Most people don’t know the names or faces of any Ukrainian aside from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Harvard-trained historian Danielle Leavitt observes — with the rest of the country often seeming “relatively nameless, faceless war people.”
Having lived herself in Ukraine on and off since she was 12, Leavitt wondered, is it possible for outsiders to truly know Ukrainian people, “not as war people or superheroes but as mere humans confronted with what was for many the unimaginable. Just like all of us, they are often brave, and they are sometimes not.”
This Latter-day Saint historian decided to try, first by reviewing diaries posted online by Ukrainians at the beginning of the war. Since it was not safe to travel to their homes in the war zone, Leavitt contacted them online to begin following their lives through text messages.
In addition to often daily written updates, Leavitt received regular voice recordings, photos and videos (however, photos, last names and sometimes even first names were withheld from publishing to protect the identity of subjects still in an active war zone). The author reports that such near “constant contact created a different kind of presence: not physical, but persistent, and often very emotionally close.”
The resulting text, “By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine,” was described by Marcia Welsh in the Library Journal, as an “important work of contemporary witness” for the way it “gives names and faces, personality and identity” to a war “mostly seen in the U.S. via news footage of tanks, masked soldiers, and demolished homes, schools, and hospitals.”
Through the eyes of a cross section of modern Ukrainian society (most ethnically Ukrainian, some ethnically Russian), Leavitt explores what she calls “the incomprehensible and deeply human task of believing in the future while destruction rages on.”
During one interview, Maria, a young Ukrainian woman, tells the historian, “you know, it’s very important for me to remember these things and to talk about them. It helps me to continue living, to move forward.”
Leavitt said she feels a ”responsibility to help preserve those voices in a form that would last longer than a social media feed or a fleeting news cycle.”
Like 18-year-old Anna, who readers glimpse talking on the phone to her enlisted boyfriend near the front lines - sensing how scared he was.
“Often, if they had nothing left to say, they would just sit in silence, but even so, she could hear his breath rattling in the speaker, and she would listen to that as long as she could, knowing she was not alone.”
Laying aside advice from others, Anna decides to join him on the front line - describing being encouraged to see trees that were still left undamaged not far from the battle, “still beautifully full of leaves, and the sun shining through them.”
While waiting for her soldier to pick her up, Anna worries: “I hope he thinks I’m pretty.”
Readers also witness the saga of a middle-aged woman from a small town in eastern Ukraine, Yulia, waiting at the train station contemplating what she might do in the garden that afternoon - having just planted blueberries and a currant in her yard.
After hearing a harsh whistling sound above her head, Yulia finds herself in a pool of blood - with her legs badly wounded. Sixty others were killed at the Kramatorsk railway station that day. After her wide-eyed daughter and other family members transport her to the hospital, Yulia made only one request of her husband Oleg: “please bring (to the hospital) one of the flowerpots filled with their soil.”
Leavitt weaves historical background into the narrative, punctuating the potent personal stories. Such as Polina, a young Ukrainian woman living in Los Angeles, whose heart pounds as she follows news and video of the invasion in the early days.
“A new, foreign adrenaline washed over her body, and she trembled,” Leavitt writes, with the woman barely sleeping or eating over the next several days, anxiously refreshing the news to “see if Kyiv was still standing.”
“Though physically safe, she felt as though she herself was under attack,” Leavitt continued, describing how this Latter-day Saint woman raised in Ukraine went back and forth between reaching out to people she knew trying to offer some help, and “doubling over, nauseous, crying.”
After a California rally, Polina reflected on the two realities she was living with her husband, John, who served a Latter-day Saint mission to Ukraine: “one in which the world was actually coming to an end, and one in which people strolled outside with their families, complained about traffic, laughed, and took selfies.”
When she and her husband began to consider going back to Ukraine, “they felt a spike of energy.” Within two days, “they gave away most of their stuff, packed up everything else, canceled their lease, quit their jobs” and found themselves dragging suitcases “at total capacity, filled with over-the-counter medication, first aid supplies, and power banks for phones.”
As this intrepid young couple tries to cross the border, the same one Ukrainians were fleeing, they see children at railway depots having stress-induced tantrums, while adult mothers stood there and “openly wept.”
As one mother got off the train carrying refugees out, “aid workers threw them toothpaste, soap, toys, crackers, and water bottles. She accepted it all, dazed, struggling to carry everything.”
“Her young son tugged on her sleeve repeatedly, pestering: ‘Mom where are we going?’ She was silent. ‘Mom—where are we going?’”
“I don’t know,” she finally said.
As the couple boarded a return train making them an easy target for attack, John and Polina looked at each other somberly. Only when they finally arrived in Lviv to a meal at their host’s home, did their hearts stop racing.
“There is no single or ‘correct’ way to live through a war,” Leavitt underscores. “Some people stay. Some leave. Some resist. Some survive quietly.”
One story of quiet survival begins with a glimpse of a husband, Leonid, whispering to his wife one morning, “We need to say goodbye” - as he prepares to leave to fight.
Compared with tender departures in war movies, however, his wife Maria finds herself stiff and angry when he tries to embrace her - full of grief.
After relying on her young husband so much, this Ukrainian mother, also in her mid-twenties, began to repeat to herself, “I can do everything now. I will be the strong one.” Yet even when she received short notes from her husband to tell her that he was OK, Maria couldn’t escape fury at his decision.
With her two young children, Maria spends 12-hours at a time that late winter in a cold basement - as she did her best to occupy her baby and toddler playing games and telling stories (with battery life a precious commodity reserved for communication, tablet or TV entertainment wasn’t any help).
Explosions and shelling were so frequent that “darting from the basement to… grab an item from the apartment, get some fresh air, cook food—risked sudden death.”
Even so, Maria would venture out a couple of times a day to make a fire to heat soup with potatoes and canned fish. There was not enough water to wash themselves.
“Sick to their stomachs with anxiety and constantly cold,” Maria and her sister can hardly bring themselves to eat. They start to lose their milk supply from the constant stress, which “further distressed the children, who batted at their breasts begging for milk that was not coming.”
When the bombing began, Maria’s body would get “so rigid that the edges of all her body’s muscles would ache.” The explosions that “roared outside relentlessly” would frighten and awaken the children during the night.
During daytime explosions, she would run to her young son, David, and “hold him close, sing him songs, and rock him gently, a meditative motion she did as much for her own comfort as for his.”
Her husband Leonid would show up intermittently, giving her a quick hug and then “running quickly to the cellar to see David, swooping in, picking David up, and hugging him tight, trying to make him laugh.”
As Leonid turned to leave, Maria would hug, but look away “so that she didn’t fall apart and cling to his clothes, begging him to stay like a woman possessed.”
Upon glimpsing her city again from the view of their apartment, Maria gasps: “Where there had been trees, or in the fields, where there used to be just gardens, now bodies are just lying there.”
Leavitt is still in touch with all the people in the book, except one - “still living through the story.” These individuals, now dear to her, continue to share updates with her, “some joyful, some devastating.”
This historian hopes her book will disclose a “human depth” that’s “so often missing from the headlines.” Through these stories, she wants to offer others a more vivid sense of “what it means to live inside the madness of an unwanted and brutal modern war.”