A Ukrainian Christmas Carol

Last Christmas, Anya's world was normal. This Christmas she is a refugee in a foreign land. Christmas Future is unknown. Here is her story.

Welcome to the December Femsplainer Cocktails for our paid subscribers. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support.

Usually Cocktails includes a podcast conversation with a fascinating Femsplainer. The Ukrainian woman, Anya, I wished to introduce this Christmas Eve speaks very little English. I recorded an interview with a translator but we were unable to edit the result into a discussion suitable for posting. Instead I’ve written up our talk, and supplemented it with my own observations and an audio excerpt. In that four-minute clip, you will hear Anya in her own voice emotionally describing what it’s like to be apart from loved ones during war time. I hope you find her story as important and compelling as I do. ~DC

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ANYA IS A 28-year-old Ukrainian woman. A year ago, she lived in the city of Kherson where she worked for the regional government. Kherson, once a thriving port city on the Black Sea, was then home to a quarter million people.

In February, Kherson became one of the first cities attacked by Russia. Much of its population fled to escape the subsequent brutal Russian occupation. Anya, her husband Pasha, and her three-year old son David soon numbered among the refugees.

I first met Anya, Pasha, and little David this past June. Mutual friends had arranged for their transport to Washington, D.C. after they managed to escape Kherson via Poland. They would need temporary shelter. We had room for them, and so for the next three months they lived with us. 

After an exhausting, two-day journey, the family arrived at our house just past nine o’clock in the evening. We had iced a celebratory bottle of vodka, only to discover they preferred wine and Scotch. Little David immediately fell upon our Labrador, Saffy. As the family collected themselves on our screened porch, I kept thinking how surreal this must be for them: from an eastern European war zone to the summer lushness of the American capital, in a deepening emerald backyard just becoming alive with cicadas.

Over the coming months we’d learn pieces of their story.  

Anya worked for her region’s cultural affairs ministry. She met Pasha through her job: He was a well-known stage actor in Kherson, performing everything from Chekhov and Shakespeare to comedies and musicals. They lived in a comfortable, two-bedroom apartment near her work. Her building overlooked the monument on which cheering, flag-waving citizens climbed when the city was liberated this fall.

On February 23, Anya took part in a meeting to review her department’s annual budget. There was talk of war, she told me, but everyone was in agreement it would not happen. She went home, made dinner for her family, and watched TV.

At 5 a.m. the next day, Anya and Pasha were awoken by the sound of a rocket blast. And then another. No one knew what was happening until suddenly they did. In Anya’s last clutch at normality, she conscientiously phoned her boss to tell him it was unlikely she would come into the office that day. He answered that no one was coming to the office and confirmed the worst: Kherson was under Russian attack.