I have a friend who takes other people’s suffering as her own, and almost physically. When she visited Babyn Yar — the place where Kyiv’s Jews, thirty-three thousand men, women, and children, were shot in the fall of 1941 — she described being torn by excruciating pain. Her experience reminds me of Simone Weil, who died in London in 1943, a year after she left Nazi-occupied France, refusing to eat because of her compassion for prisoners of the Nazi camps. Like Weil, my colleague has mystical experiences. Her health is frail, and she has experienced clinical death. From that time on she has claimed she could see the future. I am a rational person, and normally the last to believe such claims, but there was one episode in August 2021, when we were drinking coffee on a summer terrace in our native city of Lviv, in western Ukraine, when she told me that this was “the last peaceful summer.” She predicted the date when Russia would launch its invasion, erring only by a day. After the war started, she moved to Krakow. I have since met her there, and she told me when and how this war would end. I keep her words to myself, because I do not wish to expose her to derision. I can only say that with the development of events at the front, and after Trump’s victory, her forecast looks very plausible.
The Canary, the Historian, and the Ukrainian War
