Local Opinion: My friend's ordeal trying to survive in Ukraine

In September 2002, through Rotary International, I traveled as part of a team of three, through Eastern Europe to Ukraine to deliver medical equipment to the first minimally invasive surgical clinic in the city of Ternopil, near Lviv, in western Ukraine. I spent time in Ternopil and Lviv, meeting with physicians, teachers, business owners and local elected officials.

While in Ukraine in 2002, a young surgeon and his family gave us their beds to sleep in (despite our protests!). That’s the kind of country it was, and still is. He and his family have remained close friends with our team ever since.

Until last week, this surgeon, now 20 years older, worked in Kyiv. For the first few days of the war, he and his family, including 6-year-old twin daughters, hunkered down in the basement of their home in Bucha. But last week, when bombs destroyed nearby apartment buildings, the risk to his children became too great, and the family fled west, experiencing attacks by Russian soldiers on their column of cars.

It took them 23 harrowing hours to reach Ternopil. His wife and daughter are now safe, for the moment, with friends in Poland, and my physician friend has returned to Ukraine to care for the wounded.

Rotary International’s “Four Way Test” of what we think, say or do begins by asking: “Is it the truth?” I’ve been fascinated throughout my life with the nature of truth. As a teacher, I looked back in history and found many salient quotations. These two particularly inspired me:

“In war, truth is the first casualty,” Aeschylus, a Greek playwright, around 500 BCE.

“One word of truth outweighs the whole world,” Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, in his 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature speech.

Now I find myself compelled to tell the truth, as best I can, about what I know of Ukraine.

Twenty years ago, I wrote the following in my trip journal:

“Ukraine is a laboratory for democracy whose citizens dare to dream grand, outrageous dreams of freedom, and are working harder than I have ever worked to make their dreams come true. They look West, turning their backs on Russia and the past. They look to Poland, who sends them financial help; to the Czech Republic, a model of freedom and free enterprise, roaring ahead into the 21st century, to Germany, and to America. They believe that their future ‚ their grand dreams of freedom which they dare to dream, their laboratory for democracy depends, above all, on peace … .”

Last week my surgeon friend wrote me, via Facebook:

“Today I met in Lviv my 72-year-old mother-in-law, who on the third day of the evacuation attempt finally broke out of the occupation (in Mariopul). Lost weight, deathly tired of 15-day survival in the epicenter of battles without light, heat and water, terrified by the shouts of armed zondercommanders breaking into houses, beating windows, breaking doors. But she couldn’t resist asking, ‘What are you looking for here, why did you come to our land and shoot people?!’ To which she received the answer of a Russian officer: ‘If I do not complete the task, I will be imprisoned for 15 years.’”

Perhaps for the first time in human history, the entire world is now bearing witness, moment by moment, to the truth that war is always hell. There are no lasting winners or losers. Throughout history, the public relied on the art and craft of foreign correspondents, playwrights, artists, poets and novelists to illustrate this truth for us. Now we can all see it for ourselves.

We who live in the Sonoran Desert, whose ancestors for the last 500 years have seen more than enough war, must not fall into denial of the truth that war is hell.

The United States at its best can still be a laboratory for democracy. I call on all our elected officials at every level to face this hell head on, and to shout out to Putin and all the warlike leaders of our world, “Basta! Enough is enough! Wage peace, not war, so that we and our children may live.”