"As long as they are read, they will be remembered": the story of two murdered Ukrainian writers

Izium (Ukraine)There is a corner of the world, like many others, where history will never cleanse. Where words, books or any work will not be able to describe its horrors and the only thing that will remain will be a hole and a wooden cross as witnesses. This place, in Ukraine, is located in the town of Izium, in the province of Kharkov, where one of the main mass graves in recent European history is located. Up to 451 people were buried in a hidden forest, to avoid rotting in the streets, following the shells and explosions that the Russians used to enter this town, mostly of peasants and workers, during the first months of the invasion. The shames of war are covered with other shames and, after the withdrawal of the army, the Ukrainian armed forces discovered a wasteland that remains untouched today as a memory of contemporary barbarity.

Volodymyr Vakulenko's fight

Of these wooden crosses, the 319th belongs to the children's literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko. Originally from Kapitolivka, a hamlet in the Izium district, Vakulenko was found with signs of torture and with two bullet wounds fired from a Makarov pistol. Next to him, there is an improvised cemetery with neighbours, children, the elderly and up to seventeen Ukrainian soldiers who died during the offensive. This happened between the end of March and August 2022. Facilities such as the village conservatory and the public library were destroyed in that attack, as well as 70% of the city's buildings and structures. When the country's troops liberated Izium in September of the same year, they discovered the cemetery and began genetic identification to find out who the dead were. On 29 November, the results of the DNA samples were made official and it was confirmed that Vakulenko was among the deceased in the graves.

"He decided to become a writer late, in his 30s, during his second marriage. He was intolerant and harsh towards corruption and injustice, but soft towards young people and children, especially those in need of special care. He was a very caring person towards those who were in pain," explains his mother, Olena Ihnatenko. The late writer, who had achieved some popularity with his illustrations and children's poetry, was caring for his teenage son, Vitali, with ASD, alone. Both Vitali and his other son are featured in the dedication of his first successful book.

But even though the Russians were besieging and pouring fire on Izium in the first months of the escalation of 2022, he decided to stay, as Olena explains. There was a time when he had packed everything and was determined to leave, but at the last moment he decided to stay. "Everyone knew about his activism and his pro-Ukrainian views, he was very stubborn. And he started writing his secret diary, he had almost no paper and we didn't know about it, because what he was doing was more than dangerous." Vakulenko did not post on social media or show his statement in digital format, because he feared it could be edited, manipulated or even deleted. He wrote his words in a notebook, with a blue and red pen and with corrections and crossed out words. His transcription, after the fact, was complicated by apparently a 36-page encrypted text.

With the occupation and the arrival of the Russians, the persecution began. One day, while she was in the yard with her son Vitali, some soldiers came up and talked. They took them into custody and searched the entire house, and soon after they were released. Two days later, the Russians returned and took him away at gunpoint. It was March 23. With his disappearance came Olena's ordeal, who began to ask the Russian authorities about her son. "They told me not to worry, that he was fine and that nothing would happen." Despite repeated inquiries and visits to the Russian commander, she still did not know that Volodymyr was already dead.

The legacy of Victoria Amelina

Months after the Russian withdrawal and the discovery of the graves, 36-year-old Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina arrived in the Izium district, in Vakulenko's village, Kapitolivka. She was part of, among other initiatives, PEN Ukraine and the Truth Hounds project, which is dedicated to documenting war crimes in towns that had been occupied. Although she had gained some recognition with a couple of novels - in Spanish you can find them A house for Dom, Amelina, a writer and journalist, published by Avizor, decided to put her pen at the service of investigative journalism. She interviewed Vakulenko's father, Volodymyr, and he told her that his son had hidden a manuscript under a cherry tree in the courtyard of the last home where he had lived. Amelina dug up the roots of the fruit tree and rescued the notebook. This is the beginning of a story about literature and repression that has gone down in history and in the collective memory of Ukraine.

Volodymyr Vakulenko's diary contained some notes with tragic descriptions and chronicles about the beginning of the large-scale invasion in February and March. The day before his abduction, Volodymyr buried the diary under the cherry tree in the garden and asked his father to take it back when the Ukrainian forces liberated Kapitolivka.

Victoria felt that, apart from publishing Vakulenko’s manuscript, it was necessary to preserve it as a national treasure. On display at the Litmuseum (Literary Museum) in Kharkiv, after the latest bombings suffered by this city of 1.5 million inhabitants, the director, Tetiana Piliptxuck, decided, as the curators have done with many of the art and national collections, to move it to a secret location. Since the Russian invasion, more than 120 cultural sector workers and some 300 facilities (such as conservatories, house museums, art centres, bookshops and libraries) have been targeted by Russian missiles and drones. Targets that represent strongholds for the Ukrainian identity and language.

Amelina saw in Vakulenko's text a reverberation, a continuation, a strand of the well-known Renaixença Execuda, a splendorous generation of painters, writers, poets, actresses and actors and intellectuals in the Ukrainian language who emerged in the city during the 1920s and 1930s. Stalin, during the great purge of 1937 - known as Yejovixchina-, was responsible for killing 300 and carrying out reprisals against nearly 30,000. The dictator not only executed them, but his main task was to erase the entire legacy of this cultural and nationalist movement, of which a good number of works have disappeared forever. Today, the new generation of Ukrainian artists and writers claim its name and even the building known as Slovo - a word in Ukrainian - which functioned in the 1920s as an artistic community in the centre of Kharkiv for this unique collective for many reasons, is now a residence for creators in need.

The discovery of Victoria Amelina turned Vakulenko into a martyr of documentation, of Ukrainian literature that has so often been erased and imprisoned by a great Russian country that he disowns, and into a hero of those that Ukrainians mention when people pronounce the national greeting.Slav Ukraine! Heroyám slava!A path that Amelina herself followed on June 27, 2023, when a Russian ballistic missile hit a pizzeria in the city of Kramatorsk, 24 kilometers from the front, seriously injuring her. Among those affected was also the writer Héctor Abad Faciolince, who was part of a Colombian delegation accompanying Amelina. The author, like most of the victims of that attack, died a few days later from her injuries. The impact of the Iskander-K missile left 13 people dead, including three teenagers, and 65 people injured.

One last visit

Now another delegation arrives in the town of Kapitolivka to wish Olena a happy holiday and sing the Christmas carol in unison. Double vechir tobi (Have a nice evening). Among these visitors are French writers and others from Kiev and Crimea. Most of them are cultural activists who are part of the ranks of PEN Ukraine, the national organisation that is part of the World Writers' Association. They have just visited the capital, Izium, where the librarian - who lists the Bible in the science fiction section - thanked them for donating books. They say that, despite being a Russian-speaking population, after the siege by the Russian army and its withdrawal they have begun to switch to Ukrainian and ask for books in the national language. The library was one of the first facilities to open after the escape of the Russians.

PEN has been organizing these cultural missions for some time, despite the risk of moving close to the front and the roads being destroyed by passing tanks and shell holes. They always go with boxes to leave several books in Ukrainian.Kapitolivka, in his small library, there is a portrait ofVakulenkowho presides over the room where everyone is holding candles while singing "May Christmas bring you comfort, rejoice! Oh, rejoice, earth, the Son of God is born." Olena's gaze seems discouraged, tired and worried, because at seventy years old she is left without a son, and with her husband they will have to take care of a teenager alone with an uncertain future. When she says goodbye she says a phrase that may seem worn out, but in this context it has an immeasurable force: "As long as my son and Victoria are read as authors, they will be remembered, and that is the most important thing."