ON THE COVER

I

f you’re born in Ukraine, but you have Jewish 
roots, most likely your family will have an inter-
weaving of Ukrainian and Jewish traditions. My 
father is Jewish, and this means that my childhood 
was full of foods such as forshmak (Jewish herring) 
and matzah. Every year, we celebrate Passover and 
Rosh Hashanah. We cherish and honor the memory 
of our origin and know all of our relatives up to five 
generations back.
For us, family comes first. Six years ago, I took part 
in the “Book of Generations” project in Israel. As part 
of the project, my family’s historical narrative was 
reconstructed. In the process of collecting informa-
tion about my ancestors, I was given a questionnaire 
to fill out. It contained a section called “evacuation.
” 
Who from my family was evacuated during World 
War II? Where were they evacuated? How did they 
manage to survive in such a difficult financial situa-
tion? What were their strongest memories of the war?
With my father’s help, we were able to fill out 
the questionnaire. He told me the story of how the 
women and children in our family were evacuated 
from Kharkiv to Uzbekistan and the Ural Mountains 
in 1941. There, my grandmother worked as a hospital 
nurse for four years. The most difficult thing for them 
was to be in a non-native place, to be separated from 
loved ones, from their husbands, to eat unusual food 
and live in a different climate. Their strongest memo-
ries were of the kindness of people of solidarity.
My family’s reason to survive was simple: to guar-
antee the future of their children.
Speaking about these topics filled me with an unex-
plainable bitterness. How could my family go through 
this? Yet the words “war,
” “evacuation,
” “separation 
from loved ones” and “survival” didn’t sound real to 
me. The only way to understand the horror of war, to 
understand how a person feels in an evacuation, is to 
go through it yourself.

One woman’s story 
of escaping — 
and surviving — 
the bombing of 
Kharkiv, Ukraine.

IANA SYROTNIKOVA SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

TRANSLATED BY ASHLEY ZLATOPOLSKY 
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

12 | JUNE 2 • 2022 

Dispatch 
from 
Dnipro

COURTESY OF IANA SYROTNIKOVA

Iana Syrotnikova 
uses the phone in 
her basement shelter 
in Kharkiv.