The date of March 13, 2020 is written in letters of fire in my memory. It’s the day, another Friday the 13th, when I picked up my computer at The Press and said goodbye to my colleagues, thinking that I would meet them at the office in two or three weeks. The day before, the government announced in a first press briefing that Quebec was on hiatus.
Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
It’s been two years now. We are just beginning to return to the newsroom, gradually, according to the rules of Public Health.
But March 13, 2020 is ultimately not much compared to February 24, 2022 for Ukrainians. That day, they quickly picked up a few belongings to take the road to exile, without knowing if they could one day return home.
We could stay home. They don’t have a home anymore, and everyone wonders if they won’t have a country soon.
I saw a video of a young girl on Twitter explaining to the camera that two weeks ago she was happy with her life. She had a nice apartment in a cool part of Kyiv, plans, a future. “I don’t feel like myself now. I am a different person. Now I am a refugee. »
What awaits him is not a sentence of two years to watch Netflix in soft linen, one suspects it. It is terrible to see that war changes so many lives overnight. In Afghanistan, in Syria, in Iraq, in any place on the planet where it brings its plagues.
What is happening in Ukraine awakens trauma in Europe, where we killed each other during two world wars, while wanting to exterminate a scapegoat minority, the Jews. I’ve seen tons of documentaries and films about the Second World War, my boyfriend doesn’t understand this fad I’ve had for a long time. “Not Hitler yet?” he says to me when I’m watching a new documentary, and he turns on his heels to watch an authentic horror movie, his real hobby.
We have been saturated with images of the Second World War, it influences a lot the way we look at what is happening in Ukraine. On the news, it is amazing to see some similarities. Bombed cities. Civilians marching on the roads, boarding trains, millions of people arriving in neighboring countries, President Zelensky quoting Churchill, saying that his people would fight “in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets”. But Churchill’s phrase that haunts the West at the moment is rather this: “You wanted to avoid war at the cost of dishonour. You have dishonor and you will have war. »
Everyone wants to avoid a full-scale war, which I think makes sense. We wonder if the ordeal of Ukraine that we watch every day is a trap for us to break down and enter the war, without knowing where it will lead us. One wonders if this is really what Putin wants, rather than specific territories. We wonder if, by not responding with force, we risk seeing him go even further, to test our principles. Is this the trap, or the non-intervention?
There were debates when we colorized stock footage for the documentary Apocalypse – World War II by Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle. A very good work of popularization which wanted by this means to recall the contemporary character of this historic crisis to a generation which did not grow up with black and white images. Some were against the process, because it was necessary to respect the integrity of the archives, the memory of the victims. This debate seems distant when you see images that resemble this war, in color on TV or on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, but in a story that is written in the present. When you see a little girl singing a song from Snow Queen in a crowded shelter, that refugees with only a backpack as possessions communicate with their loved ones using an iPhone. Social networks will be of paramount importance in this conflict. Vladimir Putin censors them in Russia, while the West wonders how to frame them. We still cannot measure the enormous power in the hands of a handful of people who own these communication channels.
When the invasion of Ukraine started, I woke up two or three mornings in a row with an image from the book The agenda by Éric Vuillard, Prix Goncourt 2017. Often, when the news terrifies me, it is literature that rises in my unconscious. I think of taking refuge in books, and finally they come back to haunt me to tell me buried things. At the start of the pandemic, it was Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, I don’t really know why, because I had no particular affection for this book, which was compulsory reading in CEGEP, but it is probably one of the best rereadings of my life.
Reading is rereading, my favorite teacher used to tell me.
In The agendawhich recounts the behind-the-scenes political and economic games that preceded the Second World War, there is this date: March 13, 1938. When Germany annexed Austria.
Vuillard recalls that the German tanks at the gates of Vienna were bogged down. I now think it was the column of Russian tanks at the gates of Kyiv that brought this excerpt from the novel back to my restless sleep. The purpose of the German convoy was blitzkrieg, Blitzkrieg, but there was no resistance. Austria tripped on Hitler, not without cleaning up by eliminating opponents. Éric Vuillard writes: “You have to remember that at this moment the Blitzkrieg is nothing. She’s just a traffic jam of panzers. It is only a gigantic breakdown of engines on the Austrian national roads, it is nothing other than the fury of men, a word that came later like a gamble. And what is astonishing in this war is the unprecedented success of the nerve, of which we must remember one thing: the world gives in to the bluff. Even the most serious, the most rigid world, even the old order, if it never yields to the demands of justice, if it never bends before the people who rise up, bends before the bluff. »
Vladimir Putin does not seem to bluff, but it is obvious that the Ukrainians, unlike the Austrians in 1938, resist the invasion and do not greet the Russian troops with flowers. This unexpected resistance raises the stakes, threats, sanctions, and everyone’s anxieties. For 80 years, the world has never danced on the edge of the abyss so close, as if the old demons of Europe had not yet said their last words. History does not repeat itself, it continues.