At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine

In June, 2023, a Russian Iskander ballistic missile blew apart Ria Lounge, a popular pizza restaurant (and one of the few that remained open) in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donbas that was fifteen miles from the front at the time. Thirteen people were killed, among them Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian writer, and two fourteen-year-old twins, Yuliya and Anna Aksenchenko. The girls had lived with their parents in Kramatorsk, but the war prompted the family to move to a smaller village an hour’s drive away, in the hope that it would be safer. Still, their mother kept her job at Kramatorsk’s municipal hospital, and that day Yuliya and Anna came to visit her at work. Afterward, they decided to have a pizza. Van Wessel was in Kramatorsk when the attack happened and showed up at the restaurant, camera in hand, a half hour after the strike.

But those pictures aren’t in the book. Instead, there is an image of Yuliya and Anna’s funeral, three days later. Van Wessel followed the hearse with their bodies as it drove out to the village where the family had been living, and where the girls would be buried. A man came up to van Wessel and asked him to keep his distance. That seemed reasonable: the intensity of the grief was enveloping, a veil of sorrow that van Wessel, a father to twins himself, was loath to make worse with his own presence. Later, a different man approached him and made another request: it would be appreciated if, after the funeral, van Wessel paid his respects to the family. He took that as a signal; he moved a few steps closer. The mourners seemed to no longer notice him.