The sign below reads:

Zhitomir – 81
Kyiv – 25

My maternal grandparents came to the United States in 1905. Their former home: Zhitomir, Russian Empire. The same Zhitomir indicated on the smoldering sign in the picture from yesterday’s news.

My paternal grandparents also came from the same part of Russia — the part that is now Ukraine — around the same time.

Had they not left Russia when they did, I might never have been born, as they would likely have fallen victim to Stalin’s Holodomor (the famine of the 1930s), or the Nazi invasion of World War II.

But if, by some miracle, they managed to come through all of that, and produced succeeding generations of children and grandchildren, that would have left me smack dab in the middle of Vladimir Putin’s war of attrition. And this might have been me today:

. . . in the midst of a conflagration like this:

Or I might have been one of the lucky ones who didn’t survive.

Yes, I said “lucky.” Because, after nearly five years of living in that hell, the peace of death must surely seem — particularly to the elderly — a welcome release.

This is how Ukrainian-American professor of economics Roman Sheremeta describes the effects of yesterday’s horrific attacks on the Kyiv region, which killed at least 37 civilians, including children, and wounded numerous others:

“The heaviest cross we bear today is the loss of two girls, two of our angels. One was a tiny two-ear-old child who had only just begun learning to walk on her native soil and speak her first words in her mother tongue. The other was a fourteen-year-old girl who had her whole life ahead of her — her first love, great dreams, and innocent hopes.

. . .

“This diabolical evil has a very clear name. It walks upon our land, and its name is Putin. This monster must face the highest and inevitable judgment, before God and before humanity, for every Ukrainian tear and every life he has destroyed.

“But let us also be honest with one another. Alongside him, all 143 million Russians bear responsibility for this bloody slaughter. Through their silence, their blind and obedient choices, they brought this executioner to power and have kept him on his throne for decades. Every one of them who watches the deaths of our children with indifference is a little Putin. This is their grave sin and an eternal curse that will hang over their families to the seventh generation.” [Roman Sheremeta, Facebook, August 29, 2026.]

And so I send a posthumous message of thanks to my grandparents for having had the foresight and the courage to leave their native land for a better life in America.

But at the same time, in Sheremeta’s words I hear echoes of the people of Gaza and Iran who are suffering similar horrors, though at different hands. And I ask myself: If the people of Russia are all “little Putins,” are we not also complicit by reason of our choices?

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
8/30/26