The war in Ukraine affected Eastern Europeans more than people in other regions. US-based Lithuanian author Vaiva Rykštaitė explores the disconnect between her own reactions and those of people around her who “understand me with their minds, but not with their hearts”.
At that time I felt like… we are done? No. An invisible wall had appeared between us, built from the bricks of cultural and historical reminiscences of our ancestors and completely different childhoods. I have never felt so emotionally distant from my American husband and friends as I did in the early days of the war in Ukraine.
Every Lithuanian knows history, which is why I took this war personally. But every other American cannot understand – why? When people see me crying, they ask: “Are you from Ukraine?” And when they find out that I am not and that Ukraine does not even share a border with Lithuania, they are generally surprised. After all, the world is constantly at war. This indifference was painful, I felt alienated and misunderstood.
I am an immigrant of love living in Hawaii for nine years now, but this year in particular, our love has developed another side – one that is dreamy, hard to describe, as if not of this lifetime, but collective memory. I have noticed that only people from certain countries can see this side. Those whose aunts and grandmothers told them stories about deportations, local armed units, Siberia, searches, hiding places, the partisans, the pioneers, the Komsomol and the KGB. In other words, people from Eastern Europe, whom I recognise in the crowd of foreigners by the distrustful and melancholic look in their eyes.
My husband was hurt by the war in Ukraine but mostly because he saw how badly it hit me. It hurt him as much as any other disaster in the world. People are dying, children are dying, it is terrifying and we will donate some money, but life goes on, right?
On the night of the shelling near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, I called my mother. It was daytime in Hawaii. I woke her up. I did not know why I called. Maybe just in case? To say goodbye?
“What if there will be no Lithuania?” later I asked rhetorically with tears in my eyes. I cannot answer the question of what Lithuania is to me – land, freedom, language, people, culture, or maybe all of it? “Darling, if Lithuania is gone, you will still have the world...” my man tried to console me, not understanding (maybe even I did not understand it until now) that LITHUANIA IS MY WORLD. It is the womb from which I came, to which I want to return when I die.
Why didn’t my great-grandfather – bruised, hanging from a hook, tortured by Russians who were telling him that they had already caught his wife and daughter and were going to rape them – give up the information they wanted? For Lithuania. And I have never forgotten that. I can live a carefree life and I am grateful to those who prepared it for me with their blood.
I was getting distracted, shouting at my children for every English word they uttered while at home. The thought that I was afraid to say out loud kept coming – could they come again and destroy everything? I used to hate identifying myself with Eastern Europe, I kept explaining that we were in the North, I wanted to be westerner. However, a few things have become clear in these past weeks.
First, an emigrant’s existence has once again crystallised. While living abroad, as a way of initiation, one always has to cross the thresholds of identity. For example, the perception of being Eastern European and the reflection of all the stereotypes associated with this label. The conviction that certain jobs are not for us, not for people from post-Soviet countries. Because Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian women supposedly work only as cleaners, nurses and prostitutes, while British, Austrian and American women set up start-ups and personal fashion lines. It was this fear of national inferiority that once drove me to successfully complete an MA in Philosophy in London. I needed a paper to prove that I am and can do more.
Another obstacle in emigration was soul friendships. For a while, it seemed that it could only happen within our own – Lithuanians and our cultural neighbours. But over the years, I have discovered that I can call my Australian friend at night to cry; I can be silent with a Turkish woman; I can drop in unannounced, and I can even marry people from completely different nationalities.
And today I have come to a line that I cannot cross, at least not for now. I do not know how to share the historical, perhaps even genetic pain of witnessing the occupation of a historically democratic country through murder, humiliation, torture and propaganda. It seems that people from my environment understand me with their minds, but not with their hearts. They do not feel the pain of blood, they do not hear the stories told by their grandmothers in their heads, they do not realise how, being so far away from Lithuania, I feel as if I have travelled back in time, back to the horrors of the twentieth century, and am strangely reliving things that never happened to me.
The events of the past few weeks in Ukraine are something I always knew, but secretly hoped would never happen again. And this line seems impossible to cross. It is the hardest lesson not only for me but also for the world – to be able to accept other people’s pain as our own, without differentiating between races or nations. Maybe someday…
The second realisation that struck me in the context of this war was that despite love, national differences in marriage are more decisive than I had thought until now. My husband would not defend Lithuania with his body and soul because it is not his homeland. And I would not defend America for the same reason. And with this realization, we have to look at each other, see things in a new light and... accept things as they are.
Only now I am no longer ashamed of the post-Soviet imprint on my face, I hold my head up high and tell others how brave the people in my country are, how strong and cautious. I am telling this to everyone who wants to listen. I once saw a poster in photos from a protest against abortion ban in Poland that said “We are the granddaughters of the witches you failed to burn”.
I would like to rephrase that: we are the children of people whose bodies you tortured but whose souls you failed to break. Historical memory is more alive in me, national sentiment is stronger, and pacifism is weaker than I could have ever imagined. But I do not know what I will do with these perceptions. I may just get on with my life.
Vaiva Rykštaitė is a Hawaii-based Lithuanian blogger and author. Translated to English by Kornelija Atkočiūnė.
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