Excerpt from Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Evacuating New York

My apartment in Kyiv doesn't have many old things: a large wall clock from the Brezhnev era; a porcelain rooster; childhood photos of my son's father, taken in the eighties in the Donetsk region; and finally my family photos, the faces of my son's great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers. I took them all off the walls of a house in a small town on the contact line in the fall of 2021, less than six months before the full-scale invasion. I don't know what came over me, but suddenly I was scared for all these things: they needed to be saved, taken away, evacuated. Of course, people would have to be saved. But things do not have to consent to the evacuation; many people still have not agreed to leave their homes.

I keep calling people in New York, a small town in the Donetsk region, from where the clock, the rooster, and the photos come. In October 2021, I organized an essay contest for the high school students there. I know the winners well because their prize was a trip to Kyiv and Lviv. Now I want to make sure these girls leave the area, which is being shelled heavily and might be occupied at any moment. But I cannot even convince my good friend Anna or her daughter, Yasya, who has cystic fibrosis and needs urgent treatment after spending more than a month in her basement. Yasya wanted to stay, as her father and fiancé fought near her home, i.e., on the very front line.

After visiting Hostomel, Irpin, and Bucha as a volunteer, I message and call again. I am not capable of describing what I just saw. But I say to one of the mothers:

"I will help you to find accommodation in Lviv or abroad. Please just take the evacuation bus or train. But you have two daughters, so you must evacuate."

It seems to me that it is pretty clear to any woman on earth what I mean by saying that young girls must evacuate the town which is about to be occupied.

"But maybe it will all go away somehow ..." the mother replies to me in Russian.

I hang up and cry for the girl named Myra, whom I showed Kyiv and Lviv in January 2022, and her elder sister.

Yet my calls are not in vain. In a couple of days, I will receive a message: "We are in Kryvyi Rih."

Anna's daughter, Yasya, agrees to leave her town in the Donetsk region when I say there is a chance she will get cystic fibrosis treatment in Europe. In Ukraine, the life expectancy of people with cystic fibrosis is brief. They often do not even reach adulthood. Anna's son, Yasya's elder brother, has already died from the disease. Anna and her husband, Vitaly, always knew they would have to watch both their children die. But now there is a chance: European clinics started giving Ukrainian refugees with cystic fibrosis the medicine that could change and prolong their lives.

"Okay, if there is a chance to get the medicine, I am evacuating," Yasya writes to me.

Her father has joined the army and is now fighting "near home," in the Donetsk region. So now everything has changed. Yasya might live longer, and he might die.

"Maybe he doesn't want to see his daughter die," I think, wondering if this is good news. It's hard to understand what is good news right now. Yasya's blood saturation is below 90 percent, and she is very weak, but she boards the evacuation bus in Toretsk alone. I contact the doctors in Lviv:

"If she doesn't feel well, will you please provide urgent care in Lviv until I can take her further?"

"She might not survive the trip!" the doctor yells at me. "She should not go as far as Lviv. She should stop somewhere in Zaporizhzhya!"

"No, she is going where she can be helped," I say. "She wants to live; that is why she left her basement in New York."

Yasya will survive the trip.

On April 22, I will bring Yasya, a girl with cystic fibrosis from the Donetsk region who doesn't speak English at all, to Dublin. I've been told that in Ireland, she can get a medicine called Kaftrio and get a chance to live till her forties.

Excerpted from Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina. Copyright © 2025 by Victoria Amelina. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.