FIGHTING SPIRIT
By Olia Hercules
“Dear World, The history of my homeland, Ukraine, is long and complicated. It has seen dozens of leaders, cultures, and empires come and go over millennia. You may have heard much of this already—the political backdrop of today’s struggle. But let me tell you a personal one.
In the 1930s, my maternal grandmother Lusia Beschastnaya, the seven-year-old daughter of a farmer, was taken by the Bolsheviks along with her three siblings and mother from their home in Bessarabia, a region of south-eastern Ukraine. By then, the revolutionaries who had seized Russia in 1917 were the Soviet Union’s leading political power (Ukraine was subsumed into the USSR in 1922). My family was shoved into a cold cattle train in the middle of winter and dropped in a Siberian forest.
Every time my mother or grandmother told me this story, a jolt of electricity went through
