The Boy and the Bridge.
He couldn’t have been more than 10 years old. Maybe 12, at most.
His bright blue eyes pierced the lens of the camera as he stepped from behind the suitcase.
A black hat, woven for adults, covered his head and most of his ears. His face was weathered.
Where had he come from? What had his eyes seen only minutes before?
He was the next generation. The youngest in his small family that traveled alongside each other.
Only a few weeks before he had been in the middle of the school year. The bone-chilling winter made sports and other outdoor activities more difficult, but like most kids around the world he would’ve been playing with friends and then coming home to a warm meal for dinner.
Now, he was waiting under a broken bridge, about to cross a bubbling river over pieces of concrete and debris. The boy was fleeing his home. The routine of his everyday life was not only interrupted. It was shattered.
The bone-willing winter raged on. Only this time, he had no home. No friends nearby. No warm meal to return to. And yet, he stood with his head high.
Glancing around the edge of that suitcase and past the soldiers with semi-automatic weapons hanging by their sides. In the distance, the thud of incoming artillery echoed through the crisp air.
My first frame of him was out of focus. The Canon 70D, shooting mostly on automatic, focused on the barrel of a gun rather than the boy's face.
Like a wax figurine, he stayed still. As if he knew I was trying to capture his face. To tell a story much bigger than him.
So many of the hundreds of adults standing around him looked terrified as they evacuated their homes in the suburbs, but he stayed still. Placid. Unafraid.
In the chaos of the moment, I didn’t stop to talk to him or his family. His personal story remains untold. But his photo and piercing gaze tell a story of their own.
The boy with the blue eyes was one of more than 4.3 million Ukrainian children displaced in the first month of the war, according to UNICEF.
We crossed paths, only for a series of moments, while his family fled the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin.
It was early March of 2023 and the Russians were advancing on the Ukrainian capital. Days before they had launched a ground invasion with aims of taking Kyiv.
Despite efforts by Ukrainian troops to slow what had now become the largest ground invasion in Europe since World War II, they couldn’t stop a well prepared Russian army that moved forward with tank and APC columns.
In the path of the Russians were millions of civilians who left their homes and lives behind to seek safety.
It was under that bridge, where I saw the boy with the blue eyes, and on top of it, where I met so many Ukrainian civilians in the early days of the war.
One woman, Olena Khryzanchuk, walked alone. She wore a gray hat and glasses. Her purple gloves and backpack were all that she had.
“It’s a war, it’s a real war. Do you hear? It’s a real war. We smell it. You can feel it. Of course, it’s fear,” she told me.
Her voice was filled with agony and desperation. She spoke to me, knowing she was speaking to the world, trying to use her words as a tool. Not for war, but for peace. Though, as long and as loud as she spoke, it wasn’t enough.
In the course of storytelling across Ukraine in the early days of the war, there were many similarities among the experiences of the people. They were innocent bystanders to a conflict they did not ask for. And the loss of hope was setting in.
“It was like your life is broken forever and you have no hope,” Evgenia Antonenko, a mother, told me.
She walked toward the bridge with her young daughter whose eyes she just had to shield from bodies that littered the streets. Try to preserve what innocence was left in her mind.
“I will tell you that the war, it’s a disaster and that there are many there in our town, many dead people. Just like on the street,” Evgenia added.
Even the soldiers we met felt helpless. While they tried to defend their people, it was no use. The invasion was underway. They would fight as hard as they could on the outskirts of the city. Hoping against hope, they could defend their homes and their people.
“As you can see, these are not military people. They are normal people who wanted to live peacefully in their house, but they can’t because, as you can hear, explosions everywhere. Over there, tanks and all other military vehicles are burning, are fighting,” Ukrainian Territorial Defense soldier Stanislav Polun told me.
These were the humans of Ukraine. Brave. Resilient. Innocent.
Like the boy with the blue eyes at the crumbling bridge.
Broken, but unafraid.
Comments