In Lviv, Ukraine, Digging Up Old Graves to Bury Newly Fallen SoldiersAlong this hillside on a bright afternoon, mourners tended the graves of relatives buried here for weeks, months or more than a year.
Mariia Kovalska’s son, Ivan, was killed nine months ago in Kramatorsk, in the eastern Donetsk region. He was 30 years old, and his round face and blue eyes resembled his mother’s, she proudly explained.
“What is it all for?” she asked, the pain clear in her voice. “The best of the best have died. He graduated from university. He had a diploma with honors. Why did he die?”
Kateryna Havrylenko, 50, who works for the city maintaining the graves, loaded soil onto a wheelbarrow. There are funerals here nearly every day, she said.
“With the counteroffensive, many young men and women will be killed,” she said. “Words cannot express how difficult it is. Very, very difficult. Even though they are strangers, they are someone’s children, just like I have a child.”
At the start of Russia’s war, there was a small cluster of freshly dug graves on a hillside in one part of the cemetery. Now, nearly 500 soldiers have been buried here in plots filling half the hillside, she said, and more will come.
In the top section of the cemetery, city officials have begun exhuming the unmarked graves of soldiers who were buried as long ago as during World War I, young men who died early in the last century making way for those who have now fallen in this war.
“It is just so hard to think — last summer, there were so few,” Ms. Havrylenko said. “And now there are so many.” She added with a faraway look, “Until the war ends, how many more will there be?”
At the start of Russia’s war, there was a small cluster of freshly dug graves on a hillside in one part of the cemetery. Now, nearly 500 soldiers have been buried in plots filling half the hillside.
Reporting was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar from Stockholm, Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London, Cassandra Vinograd from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Daria Mitiuk from Lviv, Ukraine.
Source: The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/world/europe/ukraine-soldier-funerals-lviv.htmlNote:
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This post was edited by Norlander on Jun 21 2023 01:21pm