A mother in Ukraine says she must stay in the war-torn country

I write at the request of a young Ukrainian woman who will not leave her war-torn country. I asked whether she would want to move to Long Island, where she has friends and connections. She respectfully says she is not tempted by our peaceful cul-de-sacs, traffic without tanks, or beaches not under attack.

“I only feel whole with Ukraine soil under my feet,” she writes.

Her name is Oksana Fuk. She is an English teacher and tutor, her husband a musician and journalist. She and I share bonds that make it seem we were destined to be friends, even if merely online. The most obvious one: Oksana was a counselor for four summers beginning in 2008 at a Catskill Mountain sleepaway camp my autistic son attended — and which is run by the nonprofit AHRC Nassau. “I remember how the counselors loved Dan! Always took good care of him,” Oksana writes. Dan is unable to speak, so for me such reassurance is priceless.

Oksana and I have been messaging and emailing since Feb. 24, the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. She emphasizes that many Ukrainians feel as she does. They want to stay in a homeland their families have fought to defend for centuries, despite the fear they will be next. She sees this in the eyes of those who have lost loved ones and homes — and in her relatives and friends who, like her, live in comparatively safe regions. They know the bar for safety in Ukraine is low.

I asked Oksana, the mother of two small children, to describe her typical day: "Oh routine," she writes. “Kindergarten, my tutoring — and buying stuff in case of nuclear attack.”

She is not being wry. She and her husband are stocking up on iodine, window coverings, food, water, a radio that works without the internet. They are assessing whether they move up from their 10th-floor apartment or down to bunkers where they have stayed many times after sirens warned them of possible bombings. It gets better and then it gets worse. Not long after the invasion, Oksana fled to Poland with her infant daughter and five-year-old son. Her husband was prohibited from leaving in case he was needed for combat. Soon, she returned. Life was quiet. Her son once again played in his neighborhood park, dressed as Spider-Man. Next month, she will begin teaching English to internally displaced persons, thanks to a grant her college received from the U.S. embassy in Ukraine.

But now she has started to think about death every day: “If you only knew what is going on in my brain. Are they going to blow us all up?”

On Oct. 10, the Russians did try to blow up her hometown of Ternopil. It was one of several Ukrainian cities hit by missiles in the most intensive airstrike since the start of the war, retaliation for the explosion on the Kerch Bridge linking Crimea to Russia. Oksana’s water and electricity shut down. It came back on but the real damage — pervasive terror at home — prevailed. Her son’s kindergarten was still closed six days later.

And yet she wrote: “I have this deep, deep feeling that Ukraine needs us here. Maybe it sounds cheesy, but that is so true. Our warriors fight like crazy for us. So we must fight how we can … Go to work here, buy products from our local farmers and local enterprises here, pay taxes here, teach our kids here. That's how the nation keeps living, developing.”

Numbers seem to back her up.

The New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington-based international think tank, reported that since the invasion the U.N. "has recorded more than 10 million border crossings from Ukraine into neighboring countries. However, recent border-crossing data has shown a steady increase of refugees back into the war-torn country — currently totaling 3 million.”

This is what Oksana thinks: Being a refugee is no piece of cake. Not all are welcomed with open arms. In a Bulgarian ocean resort, Ukrainian immigrants were asked to leave hotels where they had been given shelter, as soon as beach season began.

Oksana wishes there was more international understanding that this war is not a recent itch Putin needed to scratch. That Russia and other powers have tried to eradicate her culture, starve her people, and ban her language for centuries. Oksana’s grandmother, who recently passed away, disobeyed her teachers as a schoolgirl and spoke Ukrainian instead of Russian when she could. In America for too long we called her nation "the Ukraine" — as if it was a vague place like “the mountains” of upstate New York.

Oksana lives a two-hour drive from where the Jewish shtetl of Felshtin once stood. My mother was born there in 1913. Oksana knows the place. My mother fled Ukraine after surviving an antisemitic pogrom in 1919 when she was six years old. The only reason she survived was because a Ukrainian farmer hid her, risking his life to save hers. When Putin invaded Ukraine, I felt pain deep in my bones. I am determined to do what I can to be Oksana Fuk’s voice in America, until she writes about this experience herself.

“Why go someplace else, spend at least five years of your life adjusting to life in a new country, when we can spend these years helping Ukraine bloom," Oksana writes now. "Yeah, the next few years will be extremely tough here."

But, she also notes that "we can survive it all. At least, that is my dream: to be a tourist in various countries, but the resident of the one and only Ukraine.”