Ukrainian Libraries a Year Later

You don’t have to be a librarian to think about the damages of war to libraries. If you love books, you must be horrified to see images of shelled buildings and piles of burning books, as one can’t help following the news about Ukraine. The images keep coming: television, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, your choice of media.

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A year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, our heart goes out to the fallen and their loved ones, to the ones who were forced to leave everything behind for the unknown, to the ones in the trenches, literally and figuratively.

The world learned to drop the definite article before the name of the country (read our Books We Read About Ukraine to see the significance), President Biden visited the war-scarred Kyiv, the Eiffel Tower and other landmark buildings went blue and yellow all over the world. It’s been a whole year. We can’t help thinking of the unsung heroes too.

We admire the Ukrainian professor whose photo went viral: a notebook in one hand, a cell phone in the other, giving lectures to his students from the trenches. His name is Федір Шандор, transliterated into English as Fedir Shandor, into Hungarian as Sándor Ferenc / Fegyir – he’s from Zakarpattia, an area where someone might have lived in several different countries within the past hundred years without ever leaving their village, as borders were pushed around by wars and treaties. People speaking different languages at home (Hungarian for one) were living peacefully together. The trenches are covered in snow again.

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We admire Ukrainian librarians for doing their job in public, academic, and special libraries in war-torn cities, towns, and villages in Ukraine: reaching out to their communities and serving their needs, whether providing shelter or books or adding value in other, meaningful ways, unimaginable for a librarian living in peace and safety: offering bomb shelters and camouflage classes.

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We admire Oksana Bruy, the president of the Ukrainian Library Association, for her leadership and the role she has taken in not only salvaging and preserving invaluable intellectual treasures, but mobilizing the world to assist. In an international Zoom meeting in April 2022, she gave a heatbreaking summary of what the Russian occupation of Ukraine meant to libraries. The pictures she showed us were just pale illustrations of the horrific destruction and the damage caused by the Russian army. She also called for the responsibility of Russian librarians for the lack of proper information for the Russian people. The world has learned about the difficulties with the transliteration (or Romanization) of Cyrillic through her name: she uses her name Оксана Бруй both as Bruy and Brui.

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We admire Ukrainian archivists who were among the first to realize the danger: destroying material means destroying past history, allowing volatile Russian politics to airbrush history, a technique preferred in the Soviet Union before Photoshop was invented. At the same event in April 2022, the director of the Central State Archives of Ukraine pointed out that documenting anti-Ukrainian activities committed by Russians, whether previously taken to Moscow or destroyed during the war, would certainly be impossible to replace.

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We admire the international librarians’ community that launched an initiative on 1 March, 2022 of over 1,500 international volunteers who are collaborating online to digitize and preserve Ukrainian cultural heritage. The project called Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, or SUCHO, is currently curating the full 50TB of web archives collected so far.

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We admire professional organizations for standing by our colleagues – and values, spearheaded by the American Library Association through resolutions such as ALA Condemns Destruction of Libraries, Schools, and Cultural Institutions in Ukraine. Partners of the Ukrainian Library Association, the Goethe Institute and the German Library Association, found a way to bring Ukrainian language books to German libraries in a project called “A suitcase with books,” calling attention to the many refugees who were forced to leave Ukraine with a small suitcase. It’s highly unlikely that a book made it into that suitcase, but librarians understand the importance of reading, especially for children who continue their education remotely in Ukrainian schools.

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We admire major news outlets for putting libraries and librarian on their agenda, showing the world the significance of collections, services, and outreach in libraries and archives. The Guardian article ‘Our mission is crucial’: Meet the warrior librarians points out the unbreakable spirit of Ukrainian librarians and provides rich content and context related to their activities. The New York Times calls this war “the true culture war,” and illustrates the destruction of Ukrainian culture with plenty of images. NPR was one of the first to present libraries in their new, unwanted roles, as mentioned: offering bomb shelters and camouflage classes.

Our blog advocates finding solace in Books We Read, or, at a minimum, trying to make sense of the world via reading texts that resonate with our current state of mind, connecting, literally or virtually, with like-minded individuals, discussing and processing difficult situations with the help of books and reading, the classic definition of bibliotherapy.

Reading poetry, including war poetry, is one of the many ways to cope. Poems from Ukraine speak to our worst fears, whether written in 2014 or 2022. This war has brought more poems to us, many of them already translated into English too. If only we didn’t have to post war poetry. Ever.

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