She Survived Stalin. Then She Looked Me in the Eye
A Glimpse of Hope
This is A Glimpse of Hope, a weekly column where I try to bring something gentle to your weekend with moments that refuse to vanish, fragments of grace found in the middle of collapse. What I’m about to tell you isn’t just a story. It’s a conversation that changed the way I understand survival.
THE COLD THAT MORNING OF JANUARY didn’t feel like weather. It felt like something sent to remind you how fragile we are.
Minus twenty degrees. One week before Trump stepped into power.
My hands were in my pockets, but it wasn’t the cold that hurt the most. My son of eight years old, three of them living as a refugee child abroad, hadn’t spoken to me in months.
He answers only sometimes. A message, a word, a pause. But no real conversation. No warmth.
Just that screen, and my face inside it.
That rectangle where a father used to be.
I think he never understood why I'm not physically part of his life, why I exist for him only through the screen of a telephone.
How do you explain to a child that geography and circumstance can separate hearts that want to be together?
How do you make a young mind understand that love doesn't diminish with distance, even when presence does? That sometimes, even love is held hostage by geography and war.
That particular day, the devastation felt complete.
That morning, I felt like something had come undone in me. Everything I carried felt heavier than the snow.
Then I saw her.
An elderly woman, walking with a kind of stillness I couldn’t explain.
She wasn’t rushing or shivering. Actually, she moved as if the cold had nothing left to prove.
She looked like she could be around eighty. Maybe a bit more.
We began talking, as strangers sometimes do in Ukraine during these times, when we are brought together by shared circumstances, by the need for human connection when the world feels uncertain.
I don’t remember what led to it, but I asked her something I hadn’t asked anyone.
“Will this ever end?”
I meant everything. The war. The silence between my son and me. The feeling that I had become invisible to the world.
She looked at me with eyes that had seen more than I could imagine, and she said something simple but profound:
"Everything has an end, including ourselves. But what changes is what we make of our day, our present, not when it will end, because we never know when or how."
That’s when she told me she was ninety-six years old.
Born in 1929.
I was talking with someone who lived through the Holodomor, that famine made by Stalin that starved millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s.
I was looking into the eyes of someone who saw World War II unfold somewhere between her childhood and her adolescence.
Someone who lived through Soviet control, watched communism rise and fall, witnessed Ukraine's independence, experienced decades of hope and despair and hope again.
She had watched everything end, multiple times, and yet here she was after almost a century of life. Walking through the harshest weather, engaging with a stranger.
Offering wisdom instead of bitterness.
She spoke again:
"As much as we are sure that everything has an end, we just need to know that there is an end for everything. And in the end, we will reach peace. Even if we have no life left, we will achieve peace of spirit."
She wasn’t comforting me, but only telling me how she survived.
Not through miracles. Through meaning.
She had seen entire regimes vanish. Watched famines begin and end. Heard languages forbidden, then spoken again.
She had outlived fear.
She had witnessed, over and over again, that the word "end" applies to suffering just as much as it applies to joy.
I was speaking to someone who had survived the impossible and still chose to meet a stranger with calm.
But more than that, she had learned that the question isn't when suffering will end, but what we do with the time we have while we're in it.
She could have given me anything. Instead, she gave me time.
A few minutes. A few words. I couldn’t ask for more.
Since that day, I’ve carried her words with me.
This war will end.
My son will speak again, or he won’t.
The page will turn.
Something will come after.
But until then, there’s today. And today is still mine.
My son’s anger will shift when he’s ready. And I can’t control that. But I can decide what kind of man I’ll be in the meantime.
What mattered was what I did with each day until that change came.
The war in Ukraine, it will end, too.
We don’t know when. We don’t know how.
But while we breathe, we still have the power to decide who we are in the middle of it.
She didn’t speak with hope because she was spared from suffering.
She spoke with hope because she had walked through fire and found a way to keep walking.
That’s who I want to be.
Not someone who explains the world, but someone who lives through it without losing their soul.
That day, with that woman who had lived three times more life than me, I stopped thinking about resilience as strength.
It’s not about standing tall.
It’s not about waiting for the pain to pass.
It’s about choosing to look someone in the eye and still offer them a piece of your heart, even when yours is cracked open.
She didn’t need to say much. Her life was already the answer.
She had seen everything fall apart. Then she had seen it come back together.
She didn’t tell me what peace looks like. She walked through war and became it.
And that’s the glimpse of hope I want to leave with you.
Not that everything will be okay. But that everything will change.
And what we do before that change arrives, that’s the part that’s still up to us.
Because this story isn’t just about Ukraine.
It’s about you.
It’s about what you carry.
And what you choose to hand forward.
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🔖 There’s no team behind this, just me, writing from Ukraine. And every paid subscription helps me keep this open for everyone who needs to read these glimpses of hope. Thank you so much for considering it if you can.
📖 “The Divine Comedian: Ukraine’s Journey Through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise” is my first book: about Ukraine, seen from inside the fire, and the hope that refuses to die. Download it for free (PDF & Kindle).
You bring hope and strength to us, Viktor
This one really touched me in the feelers! We all have so much to learn from her! 🌻