Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky read a passage from Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” at a ceremony Wednesday afternoon kid-focused conference as he seeks to highlight the damage Russia’s invasion of his country has inflicted on its youngest citizens.
During the more than 15 months of the war, at least 483 children were killed, he said, and other estimates suggest the number is even higher.
“When there are missile attacks every night and waking up in the morning is really priceless,” he said, noting that even simple sleep is precious in the spiral of violence caused by war. caused by modernity.
Hours after he spoke, a 9-year-old girl and her 34-year-old mother were awoken at dawn by air raid alarms in Kiev, police said. The two ran to what they thought was safety in a bomb shelter at a children’s hospital in the city, but according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko, they died right outside the door.
Police said the Russian ballistic missile flew towards the city at five times the speed of sound as the two stood outside the hospital building. Just minutes after the alarm went off, according to the mayor, one of the rockets was hit by a Ukrainian interceptor in the sky above, the child and her mother were killed by fiery debris. . As dawn broke, the child’s grandmother came to identify the bodies.
The girl’s death, in the early hours of International Children’s Day in Ukraine, serves as a reminder that the most innocent are the ones who pay a heavy price in war. It also sparked renewed outrage across Ukraine. Mr Klitschko said an investigation was underway to find out why the door was closed.
A 33-year-old woman was also killed by falling debris nearby, police said, and at least 16 people were injured, the mayor said.
In his speech the day before, Mr Zelensky made an emotional appeal, saying that the killing of children should not become normalized.
“Russia has killed – and this is why I would use that word – at least 483 children have been killed by Russia,” he said. “It killed them. This is not something that can be called ‘they were victims of Russian aggression’ or ‘they died from armed conflict’. No, Russia killed these children. Russia killed nearly 1,000 more children.”
Zelensky’s decision to quote from Anne Frank’s diary was particularly poignant because he was Ukraine’s first Jewish president. Ms. Frank was a teenager when she hid from the Nazis for more than two years during the Second World War during the Dutch occupation and kept a diary that became an international bestseller.
Zelensky quoted Ms. Frank as writing: “Humans have a motive and a rage to destroy and kill. Until humanity undergoes a great change, there will be war.”
The words of a victim of the Nazi genocide against the Jews were a rebuke from Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, who used the false argument that Russia was somehow fighting Germany. Nazis in Ukraine to justify their all-out invasion.
The President of Ukraine also read from another kid’s diary caught up in the spiral of war: Yehor, a 9-year-old boy from the city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine. Mr Zelensky said the boy wrote about how well he slept one night, “waking up and smiling,” an admission.
“I had a wound on my back, my skin was torn,” the child wrote while the city was besieged by Russian troops last year, as Mr. Zelensky recounted. “My sister has a head wound. My mother had a torn flesh on her arm and a wound on her leg.”
“My grandmother, Galya, my two dogs and my favorite city of Mariupol are dead,” the boy wrote, according to Zelensky.
The Ukrainian leader says his country is fighting for the rights of all children so that “there will never be new diaries of Anne Frank and Yehor from Mariupol.”
“Where is safe,” he said. “Where is free.”
June 1, 2023
:
An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a quote to Anne Frank. “War. I sleep well, wake up and smile” comes not from the World War II memoir “Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank but from the unpublished diary of a young boy. Ukrainian named Yehor lived through the siege of Mariupol last year.
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