Refugees Affected by War: As Seen Through the Eyes of an 84 Year Old

By John K. Spitzberg

About the Book
Refugees Affected by War follows author John K. Spitzberg’s work with Ukrainian refugees who fled their country due to Russia’s attack upon Ukraine. This is an ongoing saga due to the war going on currently and Ukraine being destroyed now. The war is killing, maiming, and destroying the infrastructure of Ukraine as this book is being created. Spitzberg hopes that all who read this book will become active in advocating for peace and social justice in Ukraine and all those affected by war.
About the Author
John K. Spitzberg is a member of Veterans For Peace, having served as President of Chapter 099, chair of an annual convention in Asheville, North Carolina and published poetry by veterans, some of whom saw combat. He is the best mediocre chess player he knows, a father and a grandfather to three grandchildren in Florida. Spitzberg was a special education teacher, master's level social worker and nationally registered paramedic. He became a member of a Community Emergency Response Team in Willow, Alaska and calls the Last Frontier home as an elder who loves to write.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889255574

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The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by John K. Spitzberg

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Prologue

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Where to start? How to write this? Should I produce a non-fictional account or go to my alter ego, David Green to lay the groundwork for two months work as a chaiwallah in Bucharest, Romania in the huge three to four block long, mammoth railroad station Garda Norte? Should I, a non-pundit, another guy on the street, talk about this horrendous war which has taken countless civilian and military lives both of Ukrainian and of Russian military forces sent to Ukraine to reclaim it as part of the Russian empire?

Is there something between non-fiction and fiction? Probably the closest style is historical fiction, but what I have to say falls short of being historical research and will not be fictional.  It continues to take place in the here and now, so long as war between Ukraine and Russia continues. And yet, what I experienced may well become the subject of many historical works when the war between Russia and Ukraine ends, if it ever does, and the historians settle down to produce volumes of well researched historiography for posterity.  

Articles, essays, books, and volumes will and are being written by pundits blaming, debating, and adding their thoughts on all aspects of the war. Even as I write this memoir of my small involvement in the saga, pundits are warning the world of nuclear holocaust, of the end of the world for fear of Russia or anyone of the few countries possessing nuclear weapons using them as a consequence of the advent of World War III. I am reminded of Bernard Shaw’s or Albert Einstein’s admonition that World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. Fear, despondency, and anger pervades. Opposite points of view make enemies of former colleagues, and yet, polarity is healthy. Friends no longer talk to each other, but then one can ask, were they ever friends?

Regardless of what I say or how I couch it, millions of refugees from those few in their nineties to babies born within the last few days and every age in between will be testament to a mass migration from their homes in nearly every part of Ukraine to all parts of the world. One family somehow reached Tampa, Florida only to be attacked by Hurricane Ian. From one human made hurricane to Ian. What kind of fairness is that, and are they cursed somehow? Just a thought to ponder.

These Ukrainians are part of a massive caravan on foot, in buses, trains, cars, even some on the backs of horses, donkeys and cows who are helped by volunteers wearing orange or yellow vests identifying them as people whose one mission, one desire is to be of service for the people defined as persons who have been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution or natural disaster. Google says that synonyms for the word refugee are displaced person, escapees, fugitives, asylum seekers, runaways, exiles, émigré and or a stateless person. I believe that in Romania and those volunteering in Poland and other countries may have seen Ukrainians who could fit into anyone of those synonyms or maybe more than one definition.

And what is to be made of the thousands of Russians fleeing conscription leaving their homes, lives, jobs, and families due to Putin’s call up of 300,000 more soldiers who will become the fodder for Ukrainian bullets and missiles? I care for them in my heart also for they have not asked for this war. They have no vote, no visible means to revolt and say NO to Putin and his maniacal tyrannical quest for making Mother Russia an empire once again.

In some respects, this migration has reminded me and still does of the Underground Railroad which existed to help slaves in the United States escape slavery, brutality and inhumane conditions on the plantations and farms in southern and adjacent states before the Civil War. To be sure, these two are very different events, but the people escaping were by and large all seeking freedom, a new lease on life and had people along the line to assist them as they ran from the hell they lived through.

For me, the comparison ends there, for no human being suffered the torment of slavery as did the Black man, woman, and child in the United States. It is a rough comparison but well worth making. I wish I could say that US discrimination against the Black and Brown communities is all in the past. It is not. Its ugliness explodes in many places to this day, and I believe it is being exacerbated by a third political party, one I call the Trumpets.

There have been many similar events. People have been fleeing dictatorships, wars, famines, pestilence, and pandemics forever. In some ways the entire book of Exodus in the Old Testament is about refugees. No history book would be worth reading which did not have accounts of such occurrences. Yet, I did not live through any of them. This one I saw the results, and in a small, yet significant way was part of the solution, not the problem.

I would go back in a heartbeat were it not for my having been assaulted by severe neck and lower back degenerative disc disease. Thank something or another for the Veterans Administration which is helping me to walk again, take care of my dog and try to become a productive person.

I just recalled something from my youth. I lived in a building with four small two-bedroom apartments. My mother and her mother, my grandma, raised me through my toddler years through the fourth grade until my mom remarried and I became a stepchild.

I remember old women who wore black dresses, gray leggings, wearing babushkas and tennis shoes who roamed the alleys and always stopped at garbage cans to look inside and take what looked good to them. They were frightened and would not speak to anyone, often scurrying away when they thought someone might call the police. They had to have been refugees from war torn villages and cities in Eastern Europe who escaped the Nazis and or maybe the Soviets as well.

As a small, young kid, I never considered their origins, where they came from and how they got to America. I never spoke to any of them because they ran away whenever I came near in the alley. But their eyes, their drawn faces, their black and gray clothing, even their tennis shoes spoke volumes.

My grandmother could have been one of them under different circumstances. She spoke German but might just as well have spoken Polish or Hungarian. She grew up in Eastern Europe long before World War II, and I suppose that wherever she was, the Germans must have been the invaders. She spoke no other language other than broken English and some Yiddish. But she was not fluent in them.

Yiddish was the language spoken by Jews in central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. It was originally a German dialect with words from Hebrew and several modern languages and is today spoken mainly in the US, Israel, and Russia. I got this definition from my smart phone. In the cacophony of the teeming refugees, maybe some spoke Yiddish, but I was too busy serving sandwiches, coffee, chai, and other eatables to notice.

From my computer, I found that Hebrew and Yiddish are very dissimilar even though both languages use the Hebrew alphabets in their scripts. While Hebrew is a Semitic language (subgroup of Afro-Asiatic languages) like Arabic and Amharic, Yiddish is a German dialect which uses many Hebrew words but with a very distinctive Ashkenazic pronunciation.

I saw the same look of these old women wandering the allies on so many older faces in Bucharest and Moldova, and I spent many hours feeling sad, maudlin, and worried about people who were my cohorts, the same age as I. Why was I privileged, and they not allowed to live their years in peace and sustenance?

I am 84 years old now. On the other hand, the refugees in their teens, twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties all seemed to have smart phones, games to play, people to communicate with, and even the small children were busy on their game boards when they weren’t chasing each other laughing and sprinting about. Like their pet dogs and cats, they knew nothing of the horrors from which they escaped.

Most of these people cried for their families left behind, especially the women for their men who were and are still fighting for Ukraine. Overriding the technology was raw, unfettered emotion and that probably hasn’t changed over the history of civilization. Will humanity ever learn to love one another regardless of skin color, age, sex, race and all the other outward signs which divide us? Or is this the rambling of a naïve old man? I think about this every day, and I worry about the sanctity of life for all humanity. I think that some of the veterans who commit suicide may do so because they, too, saw too much, felt the despair of never answered questions about the sanctity of life.

Two trips and serving chai, coffee, cocoa, sandwiches, warm meals, and an assortment of other needed commodities was to become my lot in life while in Romania. The first trip was made in March, just after the first attack upon Kiev, the Capital of Ukraine. I stayed for a little more than two weeks and vowed to return as soon as possible for a longer period of time. In April I returned to the train station and my duties in room three.  I became the most senior chaiwallah in Romania. During this period, I traveled to the Moldovan capital, Chisinau because the rumor was that Russia was about to invade there and refugees would be escaping over the border enroute to Bucharest. So much for rumors. There was no invasion, and Moldovans enjoyed peace at least then. I didn’t stay long because there were very few refugees fleeing through this country, so I returned to Romania.

A chaiwallah is a boy in India who carries tea to people riding the railroad cars.  The boys jump aboard at every stop and sell their tea to passengers. They must do it quickly before the train starts again. I drank so much of their chai when I traveled between parts of India from as far north as the mountainous lands of Sikkim to the Arabian Sea and Goa.

This then is my story, my small way of doing something, anything to relieve some of the misery, the angst and uncertainty of what life would be like in the future for the refugees from the Ukraine.

Originally, this was to be the only focus of this book. An old man flying from Fairbanks, Alaska to Bucharest, Romania, pitching in to help a few thousand emigrants from Ukraine fleeing for their lives to safety. But, upon my return to my singlewide mobile home with a fair-sized arctic way to store stuff that wouldn’t fit in the old rundown mobile home, I began to reengage with erudite members of the Veterans For Peace, an organization of old and young male and female veterans and non-veterans called Associates who were and are theoretically dedicated to the end of war and whetted to peace throughout the world without taking sides, a feat of perfect neutrality. I’ve been a member for a long time, nearly twenty years.

However, I found that I was wrong. Those of our members who are interested in what is happening in Ukraine are torn by differences of opinion. Some like myself are whetted to saving Ukraine from Putin, clearly a bully and tyrant. While others disagree. They even have a private website, VFP- Russian Group to which I do not belong because the administrators will not allow me to view it.

Repeating myself, maybe the sign of old age, I began to realize that I, myself, was not neutral. Putin and his allies are bullies invading a smaller country Ukraine and killing, maiming, and destroying homes, hospitals, schools, and malls decimating cities, farms, and everything else. Others disagree with my assessment, and some people in the organization even have a website ostensibly dedicated to promoting Putin’s side of his war while another group sides with Ukrainians. I am on that side of the court. Of that I am quite certain. Peace is not a synonym for pacifism. Additionally, at one time, VFP combined peace and social justice equally. It is this second drive which consumes me.

There is also a website for all members called VFP-all administrated by the Board of Directors. I have been banned from this website for two or more months for having committed a faux pas for which I am guilty in my opinion. Someday I hope to communicate with the rest of the organization who use this website and I will be more careful when using keys on the keyboard. I repeat what I already said to make it crystal clear. Ukraine must be supported against the tyranny and authoritarian Vladmir Putin!

In between my two trips to Romania and Moldova, I also went to the corner of University and the Johansson Expressway in Fairbanks where on Saturday afternoons for about two hours, Ukrainian flags, signs in support of Ukraine and a few people with peace signs, colorful handmade tributes to peace groups and some who came to show their support for the Ukrainians. There were two professors, a married Jewish couple, from the University of Alaska who attended regularly. The woman was from Belarus, her husband from Ukraine.  Some of their students joined them as well as people who came from the Alaska Peace Center, the Quaker Movement, Veterans For Peace and perhaps others I did not know.

The snow, ice and weather were treacherous, and I had to walk very carefully so that I would not fall. Trying to maneuver through the snow and ice to stand with others on those Saturday afternoons may have been the first sign of my back problems which were exasperated when in Romania while carrying luggage for elders, walking to the train station to volunteer and even my travels by bus, train, and air between Eastern European countries

So I have broadened the aims of this book. I want to discuss with the reader the history of the on again, off again aggression of Russia’s attempt to incorporate Ukraine into the Russian and USSR empires. I wish to alert the reader to the fact that this current war may have started during the days of the czars in the eighteenth century and to share some historical perspective of what is occurring presently.

To that end I have read books by Anne Applebaum, some books and articles by Timothy Snyder, material by those who disagree with these two authors to gain a more unbiased understanding of what I experienced. I am no scholar, no pundit or maven, and definitely do not write with aspirations of being anything more than a person who craves to put into perspective what I experienced and hope someday to continue to be of help. Lastly, as an elder, I have learned that the older one becomes, the more uncertain life is, so make the most of whatever is left.

As the book grows, it has become as much an autobiography, a sort of timeline of what has transpired from my first decision to go to Romania to be of help in any way I could to what has happened to me upon my return from overseas. The book has morphed into an account of how I was attacked by a painful malady, Degenerative Disc Disorder. So although this book is about the