I was at a men's retreat this weekend at our church and one of the men there related his experiences when he was eight-years old and his village in Italy was bombed (this was in 1943). He told us how the town was so small that they didn't have any air-raid sirens, that it was a neighbor pounding on their door a 1:30 in the morning telling them to get to the shelter because the planes were coming. He said that he and his brother and mother were running across the town square when the first bombs fell on his village and that they barely made it to the shelter before more bombs started to go off. In total, 89 people were killed that night. He said that no one seemed to know if it was the British or the Americans who bombed their village, but they had to move to the country to find a place that was safe to live. They had very little food and almost no safe water to drink. In 1954, when Eisenhower and Congress opened-up the immigration quotes from Europe, he and his father came to the US and they both worked for three years until they could afford for the rest of his family to come to America.
It was a very powerful story and virtually no one in the room had ever met someone who had experienced what the people in Ukraine are living through right now.
Also of interest with respect to what's happening, one of the men at the retreat, he and his wife adopted three sisters from Ukraine about 13 years ago, they're now ages 21, 19 and 15. They were from the Dambos area, or the Russian-speaking portion of Ukraine. He said that worked out for them since they had to go over there while the adoption process was underway, which took almost six weeks. He said that they took a crash course in Russian, with the help of programs like Rosetta Stone, which worked out OK. He was glad that they didn't have to learn Ukrainian as they couldn't find anyplace here in SoCal where they could have taken a crash course and none of the on-line programs offered Ukrainian (maybe they will now). He said that while the two older girls still remembers Ukraine, both have tried to forget their life there and what's going on now is not affecting them as much as he was worried that it would, so perhaps that's a blessing. He's concerned because he and his wife made some good friends while they were there, but have not had hardly any word from any of them since this all started.
OCU
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