Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince, 64, set foot in Ukraine last week convinced that he had already risen. The open heart operation he underwent a year and a half ago had meant his “rebirth”. That was until late Tuesday night. A bomb blew up the place where he was dining in the city of Kramatorsk (Donetsk region), near one of the most active fronts of the war. So far, the balance of that attack is 11 dead, three of them children, and more than 50 wounded. The writer and journalist, who traveled to Ukraine to promote a solidarity campaign, recounted by phone to EL PAÍS the new return to life for him after miraculously leaving unharmed. He tells it with twisted testimony of pain, because the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who accompanied him, is between life and death.
“A roar as if sprung from the ground threw us like lightning. I was falling from everything and everything started moving in slow motion. I was covered in black splashes. I thought I was hurt, but nothing hurt. I had heard that when you are hurt, nothing hurts. I remained silent, with the perpetual ringing in my ears, which are still ringing at me. Surrounded by screams of fear and pain also in slow motion. That’s how I got up ”, he recalls at noon on Wednesday while traveling by car from eastern Ukraine to kyiv, the capital.
Abad shared a table at the popular Ria restaurant, frequented by soldiers, volunteers and journalists, with Sergio Jaramillo, former Colombian peace commissioner; the reporter, also of that nationality, Catalina Gómez; the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina and a driver. He had just returned from the bathroom when they began to joke about the curfew, which forces the premises to close at 8:00 p.m., and the prohibition law, which prevents the dispensing of alcohol in that region, especially shaken by the war. Amelina, sitting next to the Colombian writer, agreed to order a non-alcoholic beer. “We wanted a mischief ago, to get alcohol. And in that moment of laughter, death comes to you, or life… We saw each other in hell. Catalina thought that I was hurt by the drips. ‘Forgive me for bringing you here’, she would say to me as if she were the culprit and not the Russians. We Colombians always feel guilty about something.”
In the midst of the chaos, they thought that Amelina was the one that had been hit the least by the explosion, since she had not been thrown. “Look. They all seemed fine, even Victoria. Still, straight, bloodless, eyes closed… In the same position she was sitting in while she ordered her beer. But she was very pale. Catalina and Sergio spoke to her, but she did not respond, ”says Abad Faciolince. “As he seemed injured, a Ukrainian took me out. I saw that Dima’s car (the driver) was destroyed and that he was further from the bomb than us. Strange, the wrecked car and we didn’t. She heard screams in Ukrainian asking for things. I got a little further away, as if lost… Everyone thought I was hurt. Ambulances began to arrive. Sergio called me because they couldn’t find me and I went back to the place where the missile fell.
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At that time, the Ukrainian writer with head injuries had already been evacuated, everything indicates that they were caused by shrapnel or shrapnel. Up to hospital number three they go aboard the vehicle of a neighbor Abad, Gómez and Jaramillo, who is treated for a bruised thigh. There, the panorama that he describes is bleak, of “people screaming and running, blood in people who come to kneel before the wounded. A gruesome scene in an incomprehensible language”. Meanwhile, “Victoria wasn’t even identified. Catalina had her bag. We would show the photo of her to explain that she is an important writer. After several hours, we went to the hotel. We went to be sad for Victoria and not understand why we were fine and she was not, ”she laments.
Abad Faciolince repeats that his trip is neither as a writer nor as a journalist, but as a member of the Hold Ukraine campaign to support the population of this country. After stopping by the Kiev Book Fair over the weekend, he headed east to take a closer look at the consequences of the Russian invasion, to be closer to those victims to whom he wishes to express his solidarity. It is in this scenario dominated by violence that the newcomer ends up asking himself questions that he believes he will never ask.
A ‘menorah’ in Kharkiv
“That afternoon we had spoken with a Ukrainian soldier who told us that he was a university student and a pacifist, but that after the Russian invasion he had understood that they were only going to understand the language of force and that, for a moment, he made a parenthesis in his speech. pacifism. I am the height of pacifism because I am very cowardly. I had just thrown myself to the ground because a cannon shot had sounded. But at the same time I agree with this soldier, that under some circumstances in life you have to face the strongest and most violent. I don’t distinguish weapons… I thought that that cannon shot, mortar, or whatever it was, was going to be my greatest war experience, ”he reflects.
Abad’s life has passed very quickly in the few hours in which he has approached the front lines and has circulated through the devastated landscape that eastern Ukraine is inheriting from the war. “We had stopped at a monument of a menorah (symbol of Judaism) on the outskirts of Kharkov, where tens of thousands of Jews were killed. That monument had been destroyed by those who came here to denazify”.
“It’s all been very, very crazy.” Abad searches for words to try to come up with an explanation that he can’t even come close to. “We are stupefied by the barbarism of a country that can launch a missile, apparently from an airplane, where there are dozens and dozens of people talking and eating. Once again, death prevails and what we did not expect happened. I barely got any sleep, and with every kilometer away from the Russian-made hell in Donetsk, I feel safer.” “This was a testimonial journey and, suddenly, it has become a tragic journey in which our colleague Victoria Amelina is between life and death. And sad and dismayed, we return to where we can… To where everything seems perfect”.
In his work The oblivion that we will be (made into a film by Fernando Trueba), Héctor Abad Faciolince addresses the death of his father, a renowned doctor, professor and human rights activist, assassinated at the hands of Colombian paramilitaries in 1987. The shadow of the repeated drama sailed when on Tuesday he called his family to communicate that he was alive after the bombing. “When I told my sisters they called me crazy. ‘You’re looking like my dad.’ This is not crazy what Sergio and I did here. It is to come here to express solidarity and to encourage them to put up with this terrible aggression”, he explains. “A friend told me that I am no longer old enough for these trots and I told him that I saw young people, women leave bloody or dead… There is no age for these trots. It’s tremendous. As he tells it, my head hurts again as if it were going to burst. My ears buzz and ring unbearably, and I don’t know if I’m going to see Victoria’s face again between those beer laughs”.
Although it had to be peering into the abyss of death, the Colombian writer brings back some lessons learned in his baggage. “All this confirms to me in an exaggerated way what I already knew. One did not have to go that far to know the abuse of a stronger power against a weaker one. I have confirmed it in my flesh, in Victoria’s, that she was not even going to come to Donetsk with us. At the Book Fair she really liked our campaign and she joined us. But this is a roulette wheel in which one falls a splinter and others do not. It’s scary to be like this, to have to live in a world where these things happen, but you have to bear witness and stand against them.”
While the car in which Jaramillo and Abad advances on the asphalt of the Ukrainian plains taking them away from that hell, an ambulance heads from Kramatorsk towards Dnipro, a city where there is a hospital with more resources. Two women are traveling in that vehicle, one unharmed and the other seriously ill. “The brave Catalina is holding Victoria’s hand. Catalina is, of all of us, the greatest example of bravery”.
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