Samuel Hanafin is a humanitarian worker based in Paris.
In Riga this summer I went to a ceremony at the Freedom Monument to commemorate the deportations of 1941, when Soviet authorities removed 14,000 citizens in less than 24 hours, sending many of them to labour camps in Siberia. One elderly woman, born in Siberia after her parents were deported, spoke of the illness, cold and malnutrition that had killed many children: she thought of herself...
Since last September I’ve been studying Russian at the Institute of Oriental Languages in Paris. After the invasion of Ukraine in February our polyglot grammar teacher strayed from the curriculum to explain the differences between Ukrainian and Russian. They are not mutually intelligible, he said; Ukrainian is a language not a dialect. The war has widened the political fault line between them. Other teachers read us responses to the war by newly exiled poets.
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