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Ukraine

MEANWHILE, IN UKRAINE

How a Whale Biologist Became a War Volunteer

Olga Shpak, who studied whales here, is now defending her home country

By William von Herff Feb 14, 2024

PROVINCETOWN — Olga Shpak is as surprised as anyone that she became a war volunteer.

Olga Shpak, right, with Kathy Shorr after Shpak’s talk at the Provincetown Commons. (Photo by Laura Ludwig)

Growing up in Soviet Ukraine, Shpak had a hard time collaborating with other kids. She swore she would never get a job that forced her to work with people. Her teachers blamed her parents, accusing them of raising an individualistic child. “In the Soviet Union, that was the worst thing ever,” she said.

Shpak had no trouble relating to biology, however, and was keen on working with marine mammals, especially whales. She left Ukraine as a young adult and moved to Moscow for graduate school to pursue that passion.

For 25 years, she devoted herself to studying and protecting marine mammals around Russia, particularly in the Sea of Okhotsk in the far east. She became an authority on the country’s marine mammals and was a researcher at the prestigious A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

But when Russian forces on the Ukrainian border near her hometown of Kharkiv seemed poised for invasion in February 2022, she packed a small backpack and went home, leaving her life as a marine biologist behind. She now serves in a network of volunteers who are integral to Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion.

The war has been “a series of discoveries of what I was capable of,” Shpak told a crowd of scientists and Provincetown locals at the Commons on Feb. 3. She was doing a series of talks and meetings across the U.S. to drum up support for the organization she now directs, Assist Ukraine.

This was not Shpak’s first time in Provincetown. She worked as an aerial observer for the Center for Coastal Studies Right Whale Ecology Program in the winter of 2015. Returning after two years on the front lines felt like a “switch from one planet to another,” she said. “I don’t know how I’ll talk about war among these beautiful paintings,” she said, gesturing to the art on the walls.

On Feb. 23, 2022, Shpak joined her mother, her brother, and his children in Kharkiv. That night, they awoke to the sound of bombs. The invasion had begun.

According to Shpak, no one in Kharkiv was surprised by the invasion. People had been making plans and preparing go-bags for months. But there is only so much preparation one can do, she said. She likened the invasion to preparing for a flood: no matter what you do, no one is ready to wake up in knee-deep water.

If those bombs were the rumblings of thunder, the tanks that rolled into Kharkiv a few hours later were the deluge.

As Ukrainian forces arrived in the city to head off the Russians, Shpak’s brother and his children fled. But her 84-year-old mother refused to leave, and Shpak decided to stay, too. It wasn’t long before she headed to the aid station in Svobody Square, the city’s main square, to start giving supplies to troops. “I didn’t have much of a choice,” she said.

That February’s incursion was the beginning of a six-month occupation of the Kharkiv region by Russian troops, which mostly ended in September 2022, though bombing continues.

The situation in the city was often dire. Shpak described one day when the Russian line came within a few blocks of Svobody Square, and a woman she was working with told her, “If Russians pass through those blocks, we’re doomed.” She told Shpak that if the volunteers were captured, “we’ll pray for a quick death.”

Shpak said she didn’t believe the woman at first. But in August, Ukrainian soldiers pushed Russian forces out of Kharkiv and began searching areas that had been occupied. They found mass graves and basements where soldiers had been tortured.

“War makes everything around you black and white,” Shpak said. “You either help one side or you let it die.”

Shpak first got involved with Assist Ukraine when Art Davidson, an author and activist from Colorado who cofounded the charity, contacted Shpak and sent her money. She remembers him telling her, “Don’t ask me if you can spend money on this or that.” That would be up to the people on the ground.

A street, post-invasion, in Kharkiv, where Shpak, who had been doing whale research in Russia, went to be with family in February 2022. (Photo by Olga Shpak)

Medicine, tourniquets, generators, and thermal drones all played their part in keeping Ukrainians alive. Shpak reached out to her former marine mammal biologist colleagues, including at the Center for Coastal Studies, to see if anyone could donate old binoculars or radios. She got loads of supplies back. She said the soldiers loved learning that their binoculars came from whale biologists.

Shpak’s role at the organization has grown. She began handling the procurement of valuable supplies and driving truckloads of gear across the country to the troops at the front lines. These trips, she said, are dangerous, but she always has “a line of people who want to go with me.”
Volunteering has given Shpak a new set of skills. She said she learned to read prospective volunteers’ faces in seconds to assess their trustworthiness. Since volunteers will have access to details about troop locations and plans and to each other’s personal information, “You put your life in fellow volunteers’ hands,” she said.

The war also enables volunteers to do things they never would have tried to do before, Shpak said. “We can eat less, sleep less, do more, carry more stuff,” she said. “You learn things you didn’t know existed in you.”

In spite of these optimistic words, Shpak also said the experience of war has left her and the rest of the volunteers traumatized. “For two years, no one in Kharkiv went to bed without thinking they might not wake up,” she said.

The city is so close to the Russian border that air raid sirens usually went off after the bombs had already hit. “Every time you pass a ruined building, you think, ‘I could have been in there.’ Everyone is traumatized now,” she said. Ukraine is a “PTSD country.”

Shpak has found that the best way to survive is helping however you can. “My prescription is work, work, work,” she said. “The more you do, the less you have time to think and contemplate.”

But helping in this way is also incredibly rewarding, Shpak said. “The emotions you get when you help people,” she said, “is something that is never enough.”

KITCHEN CULTURE

There Is Soup and There Is Borscht

A Ukrainian Christmas tradition takes on new significance

By Abraham Storer Dec 21, 2022

Yuliia Svieshnikova has always prepared borscht, one of the 12 traditional Christmas dishes of her native Ukraine, on Jan. 6. That is Christmas Eve on the Julian calendar, which Ukrainians continued to follow when much of Europe adopted the Gregorian calendar in the 16th century.

The Orthodox Church of Ukraine decided this October to allow congregations to celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25. The change is part of the church’s effort to distance itself from the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leaders have grown increasingly cozy with Vladimir Putin.

Now, Svieshnikova, who lives in Dennis and recently started a Montessori school in Marstons Mills with her husband, Mykhaylo Bokhenok, faces a bit of a conundrum. She and her family have plans to be away on Dec. 24. “Now I’m wondering where I’m going to cook those 12 dishes,” she says.

Borscht is one of Ukraine’s 12 traditional Christmas dishes. It’s served hot with a pampushky garlic bun and a dollop of sour cream.

Wherever she happens to be on Christmas Eve, Svieshnikova is game to pass along the recipe for one of the dishes she’ll make that day — her borscht. When she, Bokhenok, and their three-year-old daughter, Kvitka, came to our place in Wellfleet, it was a Slavic culinary exchange. My wife, Agata, who is from Poland, made pierogi, and Svieshnikova brought along everything we’d need to make borscht.

“For every family you visit in Ukraine, you will taste a different kind of borscht,” says Svieshnikova. Her mother’s husband prepared a version that was heavy on tomatoes, but she always found it too tart. The borscht she makes now incorporates a lot of vegetables and has beans rather than the beef or pork versions some Americans know.

Typically, Ukrainians don’t eat meat on Christmas Eve except the meat broths that are used for the borscht. Bokhenok said his family makes theirs with a beef broth. Svieshnikova uses chicken bouillon for hers, which makes the preparation a lot faster.

This is similar to the Polish tradition, Agata says, which is to serve a “clean borscht” at Christmas — “just for drinking or eating with small dumplings we call ‘ears,’ ” she says. The chunkier version that Svieshnikova makes is referred to as Ukrainian borscht in Poland. In Ukraine it’s just called borscht — and it’s never referred to as “soup.”

“People get offended if somebody calls borscht ‘soup,’ ” says Svieshnikova. “There is soup and there is borscht.”

Ukrainians might make borscht in every season but always at Christmas, says Svieshnikova. “We are trying to teach our daughter that she’s Ukrainian so she knows her culture and can be proud of it,” she says.

The traditions that Svieshnikova hopes to pass on to her daughter are not necessarily the ones she grew up with in Dnipro.

When she was young, Ukraine was still part of the U.S.S.R. Her country declared independence when the Soviet Union began to break apart in 1991 and has since been regaining its own national identity. Svieshnikova grew up with her grandparents, who were from Russia, though her grandmother is Ukrainian, she said.

Under Soviet rule, she says, “There was no religion. The party was the religion. We didn’t have many traditions, because there was no Christmas during U.S.S.R. times.” Svieshnikova says she is still learning about the ways people celebrated Christmas before the Soviets came to power, “reading why we have those traditions, how we develop them.”

In Ukraine, Orthodox Christmas is a religious holiday. But the day children look forward to is St. Nicholas Day — Dec. 19 on the Julian calendar, though with this year’s shift it was Dec. 6. On that day, children receive candy, says Svieshnikova, not from Santa Claus but from Ded Moroz, “Grandfather Frost,” a figure with roots in pre-Christian Slavic mythology. Early in the Soviet era, authorities tried to ban Ded Moroz, but his staying power outlasted that push.

Svieshnikova’s grandmother will be in Dnipro at Christmas time. She doesn’t want to move, says Svieshnikova, in spite of the constant attacks. “They bombed the market where I used to go as a child,” she says. “They destroyed a bus station; they’ve bombed the power station a couple of times. In Ukraine right now people live in a world of sirens.”

During this time of war, Svieshnikova says experiencing her Ukrainian identity has taken on heightened significance. Until she met Bokhenok, she says, she spoke Russian rather than Ukrainian. That’s because when she was growing up, people who spoke Ukrainian were considered unsophisticated: “If you were speaking Ukrainian, someone would ask, ‘What language are you speaking? Are you coming from the village?’ ”

Things have changed. “This war is the beginning of a new life for Ukrainians,” says Svieshnikova. “We were taught that the Russians and U.S.S.R. were great and powerful. Now, you feel like people were lying to you your whole life.

“We’re going to rewrite history,” Svieshnikova adds. “I’m very proud of these changes, but the price that we have to pay for this is just too high.”

Carrots, beets, and onions are sautéed before being added to the broth. (Photos by Agata Storer)

Although Svieshnikova still isn’t sure where she’ll prepare her 12 dishes — or on what day — when she does, it will be an intentional cultural act.

Despite the war, there will be borscht at Christmas. Svieshnikova’s grandmother will make her traditional recipe with no beef. Surprisingly, it has no beets, either. Beets or no beets, it is a central part of Ukrainian identity.

Svieshnikova’s will be full of vegetables, and because hers does include beets, it will be a deep purple-red. It will also be hot. “When I serve food,” she says, “I like to see steam coming out of it.”

Ukrainian Beet, Potato, and Bean Borscht

Served with pampushky — a garlic bun — and sour cream.

10 cups water
2 Tbsp. chicken bouillon paste
3 or 4 medium potatoes, cut into small cubes
2 tomatoes
2 carrots, grated
3 beets, grated
½ large onion, sliced thin
Vegetable oil
1 can kidney beans
Fresh lemon juice
2 bay leaves

Boil the water and add the bouillon paste to make a broth. Add potatoes to the broth, and while they simmer, place tomatoes in a deep bowl and cover with boiling water.
While the potatoes are simmering and the tomatoes are sitting, grate the vegetables. Fry onion in vegetable oil until translucent. Add the carrots and then beets to the onion, frying for a few minutes but without letting them caramelize.
After about 10 minutes, the tomatoes should be soft enough to peel easily. Skin the tomatoes, dice them, and add them to the frying pan. Cook the vegetables for another 15 minutes on medium-low heat.
Squeeze the juice from a quarter of a lemon into the vegetables and add them to the pot with the potatoes. Cook for 5 minutes on medium heat. Turn off the heat and check, adjust for salt and pepper, and add the bay leaves and the kidney beans, rinsed and drained. Let sit for an hour for flavors to meld.
At serving time, heat the borscht again so it is nice and hot.

AT THE MUSEUM

Margo and Zimiles: Ukrainian Roots Both Subtle and Explicit

Two exhibitions at the Cape Cod Museum of Art reflect the heritage and resilience of the Ukrainian people

By John D'Addario Dec 21, 2022

DENNIS — The Ukrainian flag — unfamiliar to many before this year but now ubiquitous — is an abstract landscape: a brilliant blue sky above the golden expanse of a field of wheat. It’s not just an emblem of Ukraine’s sovereign identity but a kind of minimalist work of art in itself.

Two current shows at the Cape Cod Museum of Art provide opportunities to engage with Ukrainian-inflected visual culture. A compact retrospective of previously unexhibited works by Boris Margo from the museum’s collection provides a valuable introduction to (or for some, a reminder of) a notable 20th-century Ukrainian-born artist with a long connection to the Outer Cape. A concurrent show by Margo’s nephew Murray Zimiles addresses the atrocities of the 2022 Russian invasion — and the resilience of the Ukrainian people — in a suite of five powerful large-scale mixed-media paintings.

Margo was born in Volochysk, Ukraine, in 1902 and came to New York via Canada in 1930. He first visited Provincetown in 1940, spending summers living a dune shack with his wife, Jan Gelb, a noted artist herself. During his long career he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, among other places, and his critically lauded work was collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He maintained a close association with the Outer Cape until his death in 1995.

Boris Margo, *From Meteorites.* (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

While he’s remained a familiar and beloved artistic presence in Provincetown, Margo has been overlooked in most surveys of 20th-century art history. Although his work received a good share of attention when it was first exhibited, his reputation was often eclipsed by his more famous contemporaries: he apprenticed with Arshile Gorky (the Cape Cod museum maintains that Gorky learned as much from his student as vice versa) and shared an apartment with Mark Rothko in the 1940s.

Margo is best known as a printmaker who also taught printing techniques to other artists, including Milton Avery. One of those techniques, the cellocut, was Margo’s own invention. It involved building a relief on a printing surface through layers of hardened liquid plastic, which allowed for sinuous biomorphic shapes and subtle variations of color.

Boris Margo, *From the Sea.* (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

Margo’s art reflects several of the prevailing artistic currents and styles of his time, particularly surrealism and abstract impressionism. But despite the museum’s assertion, reflected in the title of the exhibition, that Margo’s art somehow reflects a “Ukrainian sensibility,” there’s little in his art that reads as specifically Ukrainian. That’s not the museum’s fault; as Susan Sontag wrote, “A sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about,” much less define visually.

A self-portrait by Murray Zimiles. (Photo courtesy the artist)

It’s tempting in the show’s context to read the patches of blue and yellow in the 1952 cellocut From Meteorites as references to the colors of the Ukrainian flag, but the spots of red in the composition make it more likely that the piece is an exercise in the use of primary colors than anything with a nationalistic or patriotic message.

But Margo’s cellocuts still reward a close look. The technique was particularly suited for a kind of biomorphic abstraction that connects Margo’s work to earlier painters like Paul Klee and Joan Miró while remaining strikingly original and even prescient. (It also turned out to be an outlier in the history of printmaking: the difficulty of the technique meant that few other artists except Jan Gelb made any significant works using it.)

While Margo’s Ukrainian heritage is more a biographical detail than something overtly expressed in his art, Zimiles foregrounds his uncle’s association with his homeland in a statement accompanying his own show, War in Ukraine, concurrently on view at the CCMoA.

“My family, like those of so many Eastern European Jews, had a troubled history in Ukraine, fleeing pogroms and wars,” says Zimiles. “Boris was raised in a small town on the Polish-Russian border of what is now Ukraine, where he had intense memories of childhood, parents, siblings, and nature. There he also suffered through the Russian Revolution, not arriving in America until 1930. He hated Russia and refused to return even when honored in a show at the State Museum in Moscow.”

And Zimiles makes his family’s historical background explicit in his own work. The five oil and mixed-media pieces in his War in Ukraine series depict the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors of the current conflict on Zimiles’s ancestral homeland.

Murray Zimiles, *War in Ukraine 1*. (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

Zimiles, who shows at Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown, has previously visited the Holocaust and 9/11 in his paintings. His Ukraine series follows in that tradition.

“My wife half joked that I should have a theme retrospective entitled ‘Master of Disasters and Catastrophes’ because, in fact, making art has always been the way that I constructively channeled my own rage, grief, heartbreak, and helplessness into a form that moves others,” he writes in his artist statement. They also continue a long historical tradition — which includes Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica — of work depicting the horrors of war.

Murray Zimiles, *War in Ukraine 3.* (Photo courtesy Cape Cod Museum of Art)

Fire appears in every painting in the series, consuming an apartment block in one painting and dividing a landscape — blue sky above, a field of sunflowers below — in another. Zimiles’s compositions have a fluidity that lends them more of an impressionistic or dreamlike quality instead of a precise documentary style. Lines of tanks don’t roll through the Ukrainian landscapes and urban environments in the paintings as much as they undulate menacingly across them.

For Zimiles, the paintings are a kind of activism. “I want them to keep the suffering of Ukraine and the madness of this desecration right before the public eye,” he says. “That is why I choose to make them horrible as well as beautiful.”

And he sees the War in Ukraine series as something that connects him to his uncle and their shared heritage. “Boris was not just an uncle to me and my brother — he saved me, taught me, opened my eyes, and gave me daring and love,” he says. “So, when this horrible invasion of his homeland began, I felt something touch me very deeply.”

A Family Connection

The event: Boris Margo: A Ukrainian Sensibility and Murray Zimiles: War in Ukraine
The time: Wednesdays to Saturdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sundays noon to 4 p.m. (closed Mondays and Tuesdays) through Jan. 29, 2023
The place: Cape Cod Museum of Art, 60 Hope Lane, Dennis
The cost: $10; senior and student discounts available; free for children 12 and under

Editor’s note: Because of reporting, editing, fact-checking, and proofreading errors and oversights, a previous version of this article published in print on Dec. 22, 2022 misspelled the last name of artist Murray Zimiles (not “Zimilies”). The Independent sincerely regrets the error.

HELPING

Where the Terms Are Set by the Chaos of War

On a trip to the border of Poland and Ukraine, a lesson in what is most needed

By Agata Storer Oct 26, 2022

My family is in Poland, so in August I traveled from Wellfleet to Cracow and then to my hometown of Gliwice to visit them and reconnect with old friends. Families get government vouchers to travel with their children in Poland, so I decided to use mine to take my daughter, Malina, to Bieszczady, in the eastern countryside close to the Ukrainian border.

It is in a region of beautiful green hills, and things were considerably more stable in Ukraine a few months ago than they are now. Recalling our visit, I remember the peace of the place. And when I read about rockets and drones flying across these areas that were once considered safe, I feel a sense of hopelessness that this war will never end.

Feeling more optimistic then, I wanted Malina to see this special place and meet friends who live near there, Filip and Agnieszka Pasek and their four children. They have a blacksmith shop in Mokre. They have also been working since the beginning of the war to create a long-term support system for refugees.

I arrived harboring some feelings of guilt. They were doing so much. What had we really done in Wellfleet other than make art and raise funds for the Polish Center for International Aid? Why had we not come sooner, not to see the beauty of the place, but to help?

Filip Pasek, right, with friends Dorota Herok and Jacek Gonia. Their experience has taught them what can help refugees most doesn’t always satisfy volunteers’ needs. (Photos courtesy SLOT on the Border)

Filip’s response made me rethink all that. He told me that the impulse to travel overseas to get involved directly does not necessarily lead to the best kind of help.

Filip works with SLOT, Stowarzyszenie Lokalnych Ośrodków Twórczych, which translates as the association of local creative centers, an organization I have been involved with for over 20 years. I used to think of it merely as a group of friends who put together a summer art festival that attracts 1,000 volunteers and hosts 5,000 participants at an abandoned monastery in Lubiąż, close to Wrocław.

Since the war began, a new project, SLOT on the Border has mobilized its grassroots volunteer network to help Ukrainians. Filip is the organization’s border project coordinator, managing logistics, transportation, and aid. Traveling back and forth between Poland and Ukraine, he has had an up-close view of the humanitarian crisis at the border and the chance to meet those who have come to help.

When people come from far-away places for a week or two or three, Filip tells me, they bring a desire to do something meaningful. They expect to see the effects of their work. They want to see refugees, talk to them, take their photos, and observe their reactions to being helped. In other words, they come with a need. “They want to touch the refugee,” as Filip put it.

They also typically expect organized work, which in times of war and chaos is not always possible. It takes effort to explain to volunteers how seemingly disconnected acts do help.

“When a volunteer sees someone going with a few bags of food to Ukraine, they want to be part of that experience,” Filip said, “rather than, say, cleaning a warehouse that could provide 100 or more bags of food to a bigger group of people. The problem is people want to help on their own terms.”

Not always, of course. Filip also told me about a group of American volunteers SLOT sent to a shopping mall turned refugee center. The group cleaned rooms and bathrooms, making the whole place work better.

Filip worries, too, about the efficacy of sending help in the form of cargo from overseas. He’s learned that it costs about $10,000 to send a shipping container from the U.S. to Ukraine. And that doesn’t include trucking the goods after they’ve arrived. Such deliveries require the work of many volunteers to sort and distribute donations. Truckloads of donated goods often stand for days on the border, and their cargo is sometimes lost to thieves or corruption.

Expensive or hard-to-get medical supplies are perhaps the only things worth shipping from overseas, Filip says. When it comes to food and clothing, it’s much better to send money to a local organization that can purchase products from local vendors more cheaply. SLOT, for example, can be more responsive to the situation on the ground. “One week ago, we needed space heaters,” he said. “Now we are buying gas masks.”

With a storage facility close to the border, SLOT stocks up on supplies and transports them into Ukraine through a trusted network of Ukrainian organizations, especially church groups, which tend to be experienced and less prone to corruption.

In a Ukrainian palace that’s sitting empty near the Polish border, a group is working to ready a winter home for those displaced by war.

Now that winter is coming, Filip’s group is focusing on setting up a safe, warm place where displaced Ukrainians can stay — an initiative that is increasingly relevant considering the recent attacks by Russian forces on energy infrastructure.

Filip showed me a building SLOT is hoping to rent for refugees. It was once a luxurious vacation hotel in a former palace on the Ukrainian side of the border, only a 20-minute drive from Poland.

“It can house 1,300 people, and now it is empty,” said Filip. It is the kind of place most needed by Ukrainians who lack the resources to cross the border and elderly people who can’t stay in houses without power in the winter but don’t want to travel far from home.

Having a place will help volunteers put their “SLOT hospitality” values into action. They plan to focus on giving refugees meaningful activities and work, things Filip said will help them “rebuild their independence, agency, and sense of meaning.”

It can be overwhelming to absorb the news about everything that’s going wrong in the world right now. But I came back from this trip with stronger convictions about how to help.

We don’t need to travel to the front lines to make a difference. We can choose a cause close to our hearts as Filip has done and seek out trusted organizations to support. It is worth remembering that systems made up of small steps can add up.

For people on the other side of the globe, our giving can be life-changing, even if we don’t ever witness the joy it brings.

WAR IN UKRAINE

Organizing for Survival in Small-Town Ukraine

As aid flows in, life in Kopychyntsi brightens a bit

By Paul Benson May 25, 2022

PROVINCETOWN — The first time the Independent spoke with Mayor Bogdan Kelichavyi and his wife, Mariya Tuzyk, of Kopychyntsi, Ukraine, they spent most of the video call in the town hall basement, which was functioning as a rudimentary bomb shelter.

The Russian invasion was only six days old, and the north, east, and south of Ukraine were “on fire,” as Kelichavyi put it. His 13,000 constituents and about 2,000 refugees were hunkered down, counting weapons and food supplies, and wondering if the relative safety of western Ukraine, near the Polish and Romanian borders, would last.

Mayor Bogdan Kelichavyi and Mariya Tuzyk in the town hall offices of Kopychyntsi, Ukraine, on May 18, 2022. (Video screenshot by Paul Benson)

The six days had felt like six months, Kelichavyi said then.

Almost three months later, the situation in Kopychyntsi is a bit brighter. The Russian invasion has been halted in the south and defeated in the north, although the east remains a horrific battlefront. Aid from NATO countries and Western nonprofits has grown from a trickle to a flood. The Polish border crossing is so jammed with supplies coming in, Kelichavyi said, that the truck drivers cook barbecue and hang their laundry from trees while they wait to be cleared for entry.

In fact, at one point, there were so many barricades manned by volunteers in western Ukraine that the military had to ask people to take them down, Kelichavyi said.

“The Territorial Defense Force was very difficult to organize, especially when everybody was panicking and everyone’s trying to volunteer, but on his own terms,” said Kelichavyi. “The people would come and say, ‘We want to establish another block post,’ and I would say, ‘But we already have them!’ ” said Kelichavyi. “And they would say, ‘No, we need more! How will we protect our families? The Belarussians will come from the north!’ ”

President Zelenskyy’s military adviser finally broadcast a video, said Kelichavyi: “Hello people from western Ukraine! Please destroy your block posts! It takes hours to go 10 kilometers!”

Finding leadership for the Territorial Defense Force was a challenge, too, the mayor said.

“We had three people who wanted to lead the unit,” said Kelichavyi. “The ex-mayor, the guy who owns the taxis, and the guy who owns the café and sells real estate.”

“It’s random people,” said Tuzyk. “No experience of how to lead a defense team. Absolutely no idea. They just wanted to do it.”

Eventually, Kelichavyi found someone with military experience but whose health prevented him from going to the front, which settled the matter.

Displaced People

Caring for families who fled the Russian invasion has been one of the biggest challenges, said the couple. “Bogdan became like a part-time real estate agent,” said Tuzyk. “He was going into all these almost-abandoned homes in the villages and putting people in them.”

Displaced Ukrainians are also living in two schools, a disused church, a Soviet-era cultural center, and an old five-story apartment building. The church currently holds 20 people from Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine that is near the worst of the fighting right now.

The mayor’s team recently asked them what they needed. “The main thing was one more stove, because they only had one for 20 people,” said Kelichavyi. “They needed one more shower because there was only one. They needed a stick for the cats to scratch their nails on, and they also asked if they could have some flowers to plant.”

The street they’re on is beautiful and well-kept, explained Tuzyk, except for the two abandoned buildings housing refugees. The people from Kramatorsk planted roses to thank their new neighbors.

School renovations are being paid for by grants. In fact, grant writers are in high demand. Multiple displaced grant writers are working in Kopychyntsi town hall, including the mayor’s brother, who fled Irpin, near Kyiv, when a missile hit his apartment building. Two more arrived from Zaporizhzhia province.

“A former coworker called me, and said, ‘My friends just escaped from the front, and I think they’re in your community. Can you host them?’ ” the mayor said. “It was late at night, so we sent them to the kindergarten shelter.”

They were soon working to get grants that paid to install showers in that kindergarten. They share an office in town hall now, though one is currently in Poland gathering supplies.

Direct Relief

International nonprofits are arriving in Ukraine now, bringing checkbooks and elaborate applications.

“We want to work with these NGOs, because these grants really help us,” said Tuzyk. But the paperwork can be daunting. Three European NGOs told Kelichavyi they would arrive in town the next morning. Their joint “capacity assessment” form was a four-page single-spaced list of questions, in English — and could it be done by the morning?

Kelichavyi is now looking for a grant to pay his volunteer grant writers. This is why people who organize direct no-strings relief are so appreciated.

Brit Fontenot, the economic development director of Bozeman, Mont. who met Kelichavyi at conferences in Ukraine and Oregon, helped organize a fundraiser for Ukraine at a local restaurant. With students and faculty at Montana State University, he reached out to a local health-care nonprofit, the Billings Clinic.

Mayor Kelichavyi unpacking medical supplies organized by Bozeman’s Ukraine Relief Effort and donated by the Billings Clinic. (Photo courtesy Bogdan Kelichavyi)

Kelichavyi sent the clinic a wish list of medical supplies that was almost 300 lines long. Zach Benoit, community relations coordinator at the clinic, told the Independent they were able to donate almost all the items on the list from their existing inventory. UPS donated the shipping from Billings to Bozeman, and Delta Airlines waived its excess baggage fees so that two people at MSU with links to Poland could fly to Warsaw and then drive to the Ukrainian border with 10 enormous boxes of medical supplies.

“Trying to do shipping the traditional way just wasn’t going to work,” said Fontenot. The Polish members of Bozeman’s Ukraine relief effort were essential for getting the supplies across Poland and into Ukraine a few weeks ago.

In Provincetown, Lise King organized a similar direct relief effort. She had contacts in Ukraine from a film project in 2014, and those friends led her to Dr. Olesya Vynnyk of the Civilian Medical Battalion in Lviv. A fellow graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Dr. Jennifer Webster, knew of a church in Colorado involved in medical missions, and Vynnyk and Webster selected 860 pounds of supplies for the hospital in Lviv. The church donated the supplies, a Ukrainian-focused shipping company in Arvada, Colo. added it to their cargo flight to Poland, and 44 boxes of medical supplies arrived in Lviv in April.

Dr. Olesya Vynnyk of the Civilian Medical Battalion in Lviv, Ukraine, with medical supplies delivered from Arvada, Colo. to Ukraine by Meest-America, a Ukrainian-focused shipping company. (Photo courtesy Lise Balk King)

Both Fontenot’s group and King’s are putting together their second shipments now.

King said there are at least two reasons to organize this kind of direct relief.

“The big organizations do a lot of really important work,” she said, “but you throw your money out to them and it feels a bit nebulous — like, I know it’s going to Ukraine, but I don’t know any of the specifics. There’s a very different feeling when you know where this stuff is going, and you know who’s using it.”

The difference isn’t just on the American side. Dr. Vynnyk told King that, on dark days, when people are dying, it makes a difference that there are specific people, not just big organizations, that are sending help.

“My volunteers are exhausted,” Vynnyk told King in a late-night text message in April. “It’s hard to work now.”

Volunteer-organized relief efforts, she said, “give us hope. It has no price.”

FAMILY HISTORY

From Ukraine to Provincetown

Today’s news echoes a family’s century-old story of flight

By Lise King and Bunny Pearlman Apr 13, 2022

Lise King’s and Bunny Pearlman’s family photograph from Kyiv, Ukraine, taken in 1898.

The picture at right is a family photo. It was taken in 1898 in Kyiv, Ukraine and is the original cabinet card — a thin photograph mounted on a 4¼-by-6½-inch card. It shows Bunny Pearlman’s grandmother, Jenny (or Jenya), sitting in her mother’s lap. The others are Jenny’s grandmother, at the far left — Lise King’s great-great-great-grandmother — and Jenny’s aunt and sister.

Lise carried this photo with her to Ukraine in 2014 when she was working on a documentary film project during the uprising known as the Maidan Revolution. She showed it to a few people who explained the significance of the clothing, the women’s hairstyles, and the entire scene. These were members of an upwardly mobile Jewish family that must have been well integrated into Ukrainian society. The fact that such a photograph was taken at all meant that theirs was a family of some substance, Lise was told.

The children are wearing traditional Ukrainian embroidery. Jenya’s mother’s dress is in the contemporary style, but the grandmother is wearing a traditional babushka, the old-fashioned head kerchief tied under the chin of Polish and Russian peasant women.

Between 1880 and 1920, two million Eastern European Jews emigrated to the United States. Jenny’s mother had been born in a shtetl, a farm village, near Odessa, on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. The coming of pogroms and the persecution and killing of Jews in the early years of the 20th century led her to flee to the United States in 1917 with her husband, Sam. It was an arranged marriage — which made it easier for them to travel to the new world together. Jenny was pregnant.

Jenny went to work in the garment industry. She spoke Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and heavily accented English and was literate in all of them.

Grandma Jenny and family in Provincetown in 1968. (Photos courtesy Lise King)

Sam was an actor in the Yiddish theater in New York; he was very handsome. In the first half of the 20th century, Second Avenue was known as the “Yiddishe Broadway.” He was also a philanderer. When he knocked up a young seamstress who worked in Jenny’s sweat shop, Jenny divorced him. Now she was a single mom with two children, living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, where she copied the latest fashions from the windows on Fifth Avenue and sold patterns and samples to clothing discounters.

Lise keeps the 1898 photo of her Kyiv family on the wall of her living room and looks at it every day, thinking of the journey it has made from Ukraine to Ellis Island to the Lower East Side to Cape Cod. The photo above shows Jenny at the far right in Provincetown in 1968 with, from the left, her granddaughter Nancy Pearlman, great-granddaughter Lise Balk King, great-grandson Jack Newman, and granddaughter Bunny Pearlman.

As far as we know, all of the relatives who remained in Ukraine until World War II were killed in the Holocaust.

That knowledge has always been a heavy thing to carry and to say out loud. People react with shock when you tell them. We wonder how such cruelty could have been possible. It has always lived at a shrouded distance from us — and yet here we are again. The ease with which crimes are now being committed in Ukraine brings the old history close. Now we can see how it happened, how easily they killed our families. Just gone.

We say “Never again” in Jewish homes. Now it is our responsibility to act.

Lise King, a filmmaker, and her mother Bunny Pearlman, an artist, live in Provincetown.

INVASION

‘We Need to Stand Together’

A small-town mayor in Ukraine faces the unthinkable

By Paul Benson Mar 2, 2022

In a one-hour conversation on Tuesday, Bogdan Kelichavyi had to relocate four times. He began our video call in his town hall office in Kopychyntsi, Ukraine but was interrupted almost immediately by the sound of air-raid sirens. He and his wife moved down two flights of stairs to a dark basement.