Dawn in Podil. The Jewish quarter of Kyiv from times past. March 21, 2024, sunrise and missiles over the Dnipro river — although it was impossible to see the sunrise from inside the bomb shelter.
In a frame on my desk there is a scrap of paper that Václav Havel once left behind on a stage in Bratislava. Pravda a láska, he wrote. Truth and love, with some florid lines doodled around the letters. It was November 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and the Central European Forum had organized a series of conversations at the Hviezdoslav Theatre in the Slovak capital. Havel likely said nothing new that day: he had long insisted that truth and love would prevail over lies and hatred. And there are moments when they have and moments when they do. Evil regimes are sometimes vanquished. In November 1989, on Wenceslas Square in Prague, crowds jingled their keys and called out “For whom the bell tolls!”