March 14, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” an account of his overnight visit with journalist Kristina Berdynskykk in an underground space of a Kyiv metro station. Every night, Yaffa says, Kyiv metro stations “fill with as many as fifteen thousand civilians, from young families with inflatable mattresses to babushkas who remember wartime stories from their parents many decades ago.” He says of Berdynskykk,

Along with her sixty-seven-year-old mother, Galina, and seventeen-year-old niece, Nastya, she had secured a place inside a train car, which tends to be a few degrees warmer than the concrete platform. On every surface, several dozen people lay in various angles of awkward recline, surrounded by rolling suitcases and plastic shopping bags.

Yaffa puts us squarely there, in the makeshift bomb shelter, when the lights go down for the night:

After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow.

That passage is inspired!

Photo by Emanuele Satolli, from Joshua Yaffa's "Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter"