Naumenko, 39, had warned his entourage since the beginning of December that war was imminent. A war historian who has spent 20 years interviewing survivors of past European conflicts, she thought she knew what was coming next. She stocked up on food, urged her friends with children to leave the eastern Ukrainian town and sent all her research to her boss in the US to get them to safety in case he something would happen.
Most of the people she knew listened to her patiently, but dismissed the possibility of a full-scale Russian invasion. To appease him, some of them booked tickets from Kharkiv, then quickly canceled them. Naumenko's boss insisted war was unthinkable - but seeing how worried she was, he paid her two months' salary to reassure her.
“No one believed me,” Naumenko said. "Even my parents laughed."
The morning after the engagement party, February 24, Naumenko was jolted awake by a call from another friend. It was 5:30 in the morning. "Vita, the war is starting, what are we going to do?"
Kharkiv, located less than 50 kilometers from the Russian border, was one of the first Ukrainian cities in the sights of the invading Russian army. Within three weeks of that wintry night at the bar, Naumenko's young and vibrant home was reduced to rubble. A few days after celebrating her engagement, her friend, Viacheslav Saienko, was dead.
Ukraine's second-largest city has been under near-constant bombardment since the start of a conflict the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" aimed at demilitarizing and "denazifying" Ukraine. Although an accurate death toll is hard to come by, morgues in Kharkiv are overflowing and hundreds of city residents are among the casualties. The Kremlin denies targeting civilians.
For those who remain, the danger is more acute than ever: Russia has redoubled its efforts to seize eastern Ukraine since its forces withdrew from the area near Kiev at the end of end of March.
Saienko, 34, was working as a volunteer in the Territorial Defense Force in central Kharkiv when he was reported missing. For more than a week, his friends and family have been trying to find him, calling hospitals and posting pleas for help on Instagram, even searching among the more than 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees who have fled to Poland. . Saienko's body was eventually found, buried under rubble.
Although Naumenko spent two decades studying European conflicts, the reality of war still seemed very distant -- something that happened to other people. As a historian, she has interviewed hundreds of survivors of Nazi German aggression and Soviet occupation. But listening to them describe the horrors they experienced, she never fully grasped what the aerial bombardment felt like. She hadn't expected the explosions to be so strong – so global that it felt like dying over and over again in the center of the blast.
"I used to believe that if someone dies from military action, it's over in a second and you can't feel anything. But now I get it: you can feel it. And only one second can feel like an hour," she said.
When she decided to leave Kharkiv in early March, it took her 28 hours to reach the western city of Lviv, largely out of range of Russian bombardment.
Getting off the train in Lviv felt like stepping back in time. The station, with its vaulted glass ceilings and long lines of mothers with their children queuing to board outgoing trains, looked like the black-and-white photographs of World War II refugees. In these images, faces were blurred and indistinct. Today Naumenko stands in a similar crowd, a nameless face in a mass of people desperate to flee.
She was one of 10 million displaced Ukrainians whose lives were turned upside down by Russia's invasion. Her new status seemed foreign to her, something that belonged to the elderly survivors she had interviewed of decades-old wars.
Caught in a sea of refugees on the Polish-Ukrainian border, Naumenko had no idea which direction to take. She met her sister's family, who had fled Zaporizhzhia, in southeastern Ukraine, after the attack on the nuclear power plant by Russian forces. Volunteers eventually took Naumenko and his relatives to a youth center, dedicated to preserving Holocaust memory, which is 2 kilometers from the former Nazi Germany death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau . Some 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz during World War II.
As the birch trees swayed in the small yard, Naumenko took a puff from a menthol cigarette and looked up at the birds.
“I fled Kharkiv and am trying to survive Auschwitz,” she says, marveling at her own journey to escape war. "I never really wanted to emigrate," she added. "I see my country's problems, but I saw no reason not to live in the country I love."
A ONCE DYNAMIC CITY
Born during the declining years of the Soviet Union, Naumenko grew up in Zaporizhzhia, an industrial city known as a center of manufacturing. One of his earliest memories is of his father, a school principal and staunch supporter of Ukrainian independence, teaching him his own version of a then-popular satirical verse that poked fun at past Soviet leaders. and present. "It went something like: I'm a little girl, I don't go to school, I haven't seen Lenin and I never want to see him," Naumenko smiles.
She left home at 17 to study history at Karazin Kharkiv National University. She then completed her doctoral dissertation on economic policy in Nazi-occupied Ukraine and spent more than a year in Freiburg and Berlin, buried in archival research.
At the same time, Kharkiv, the former capital of Ukraine known for its imposing Soviet constructivist architecture, was experiencing its own renaissance.
In recent years, the city had become a magnet for young entrepreneurs and a hub for academia and the arts. Rather than leaving after graduating from university, young Ukrainians and foreigners stayed in Kharkiv to open small businesses, cocktail bars and cafes -- all in a city once known for its heavy industry.
On February 24, hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the "special military operation" against Ukraine, Ms. Naumenko stood on the balcony of her ninth-floor apartment as fires broke out. said in the distance. Below her, the air raid sirens wailed along the wide empty avenues of the city.
On March 2, a Russian plane flew low over his building to bomb a block of flats 200 meters away. His room was violently shaken by the explosion.
For the next two days, Naumenko lived underground, shivering under a floral-patterned duvet in the damp basement of a nearby building. The shelling continued all day and late into the night. Although her house was full of food she had stored before the war started, she found herself unable to eat. On March 3, Naumenko finally made the decision to leave.
"I felt like a traitor. But I realized that I couldn't help my country by staying in this shelter, doing nothing," she said a week later, sitting in the dining room noisy youth center in Oswiecim. She pushed a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes and exhaled deeply.
"Every morning I have that minute where I can't remember anything. It's only a minute. Then reality hits."
Before the invasion, Naumenko was the coordinator of an annual academic conference held in different cities in Europe with scholars from Belarus, Russia, Germany and Ukraine. During these meetings, historians compared their views on World War II and kept in touch afterwards.
When the Kremlin launched its incursion, some of her peers in Russia contacted her on Facebook, telling her how guilty they felt about the conflict. A former colleague told him he didn't know what to do to help Ukrainians, adding that it was "incredible" that the two countries were fighting when they had so much in common: language, culture, the story.
For Naumenko, the idea that Russia and Ukraine are inexorably linked and that Ukrainians are part of the Russian whole was precisely the misconception and misreading of history that she and her colleagues had tried to dissipate. His Russian colleague meant well. Naumenko felt she had run out of energy to argue with him.
For hundreds of years, the Ukrainian language and any expression of independent Ukrainian culture and identity was suppressed, first under the Russian Empire and then by the Soviets. Millions of Ukrainians perished during the Holodomor, or starvation, of the 1930s, following Joseph Stalin's efforts to collectivize agriculture and eradicate the nascent Ukrainian nationalist movement. Mr Putin said modern Ukraine was "entirely created by Russia" and that Ukraine has no tradition of a true state.
"That's why we have this war," Naumenko told his Russian colleague. "Because you still don't understand that we are not the same. We are two different nations with two different identities."
Scrolling through social media on her phone in Poland, she saw how disinformation and propaganda about the war in Ukraine proliferated on Russian-language posts. Civilian deaths in cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol were dismissed or even blamed on the Ukrainians themselves.
"As a historian, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, I would never have thought that with the internet, with new communications, people could be so influenced by propaganda", a- she declared.
A poll by Russian polling institute Levada Center found public support for Putin at 83% in March, down from 71% in February. The same poll found that 81% of those polled supported the war in Ukraine.
Before the Russian bombing, Naumenko and his employer, Jochen Hellbeck, a history professor at Rutgers University, were working on a book based on the testimonies of Soviet survivors of the Nazi occupation. Now she wonders if such first-hand accounts will be helpful, when even live videos of missile attacks and photographs of civilian deaths don't seem to change the minds of supporters of the Russian onslaught.
“We should have done this before the war. Maybe some people, after reading it, would have changed their minds,” she said of the book, which will be published next year. next.
She now feels desperate to reach those who are so influenced by propaganda that they can't "hear" anything else.
"Really, as a historian, I feel like I lost".
After spending just over a week in his temporary accommodation in Oswiecim, it was time to move on. A former colleague in Germany found apartments where Naumenko and his sister's family could stay. Again carrying her two small backpacks and her cats, Naumenko boarded a long-haul bus, this time to Berlin.
Spring is when Berlin is at its most beautiful, but Naumenko saw nothing of the city as she spent her early days haggling with local bureaucrats, who wanted additional documents to prove she had already a permanent residence in Berlin.
It took him two days to register for temporary protection at the temporary refugee center at the old Tegel airport, where a well-meaning volunteer kept insisting that there was "no point" in her ever returning home.
"She said to me: 'Ok, and what are you going to do there? Because for at least 20, 30 years, there will be nothing in Ukraine', and so on", Naumenko said. "It's really hard to hear such things."
Under a European Union directive, Ukrainians fleeing war can be granted temporary protected status, which gives them residence permits as well as access to state services, including including social protection.
After days of constantly moving, the quietness of the large apartment was disconcerting. She quit smoking and strolled through her new neighborhood near Bersarinplatz, a square named after the Soviet officer whose troops were the first to enter Berlin at the end of World War II.
Whenever she had a moment of respite, Naumenko thought of Kharkiv.
But looking at the photos of the city posted on Facebook or Instagram by residents who remained there, Naumenko no longer knew his city. The streets were deserted and its once bustling center lay in ruins. Apartment buildings looked like dollhouses, their torn facades revealing ordinary lives suspended in time: cluttered kitchen tables, a child's high chair knocked over, torn curtains flapping in the wind.
"I hear the name of a street that I know very well but I can't recognize it anymore," she says.
Nearly half of Kharkiv's 1.5 million residents have fled, including Saienko's fiancée, Anastasiia Hriaznova, who now lives in Poland. Around 100,000 people are hiding underground, sleeping in Kharkiv's metro stations to avoid the relentless shelling. Russia denies targeting civilians.
As of April 8, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed the presence of some 3,800 civilian casualties in Ukraine, but the official count is likely to climb in the coming weeks. In the beleaguered port city of Mariupol alone, the local mayor said 5,000 people are believed to have died and were hastily buried in mass graves.
Naumenko, who has spent her life studying the past, isn't sure she can still call herself a historian. Would Ukraine even need historians after the war, she wondered. Certainly, it was far less important than the more practical professions needed to rebuild the country.
“I have no pity for destroyed buildings because I understand that we are going to rebuild everything,” she says, her face lit by the soft morning light filtering through her window in Berlin.
"But my dream is that my people survive".
Sitting among someone else's furniture in a country that wasn't her own, Naumenko was sure of only one thing.
"I left everything. And it doesn't matter if I have it again one day. The most important thing is to have this possibility to come back and I want to come back very, very strongly “, she said, tears streaming down her face.
"It's my dream to come back".
How we reported this story
This report is based on multiple interviews with Naumenko, his sister and half a dozen other refugees from Kharkiv. Reuters also spoke with volunteers working on the Polish-Ukrainian border and with representatives of the Oswiecim youth center which hosted Naumenko. The report also reflects reports from the ground in Kharkiv, where a Reuters photographer visited former neighborhoods Naumenko used to frequent. Naumenko's accounts of the early days of Russia's attack on Kharkiv are consistent with reports of fighting in the region at that time.
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