By any standards, Victoria Belim is extraordinary. She speaks 17 languages. She is a qualified perfumier as well as a writer and journalist. Her first book, The Rooster House, has just been translated into Ukrainian, winning immediate accolades. She knows all about literature, architecture, nature and art. And she has a wicked sense of humour.
We have traveled on many trips together in Ukraine, some bucolic like a visit to Bessarabia which featured so many glorious meals in people’s homes there was barely time to pause in between. Victoria still managed to fit in a midnight plate of stew and potatoes which we were offered just an hour or two after we had finished our second dinner, or was it the third?
We shared a flat in Kherson where you couldn’t keep the lights on in the evening in case it attracted the attention of Russian artillery across the river. We got lost trying to find the block of flats in the dark, and Victoria managed to navigate us safely back there, mainly by recognising the plump white cat which lived on the steps outside. We helped to make Christmas cakes in a food truck at a snowy park in Sumy. I went to hear her talk about The Rooster House at literary discussions in Kyiv and Kharkiv, and understood only the stories which she had originally told me in English. It was still wonderful to share in the moment.
Her work is already remarkable, but she has spent the last few months working with an evacuation team which rescues people from the most dangerous areas of the kill zone in Ukraine’s Donetsk region - raising an astonishing €25,000 for them in the process.
Her working life began in journalism, while perfumery was a passion which she developed later. She had started a blog back in 2005 while she was studying political economy, just for something completely different on which to focus her mind, building up a loyal audience writing about the scents she remembered from her great grandmother's garden in Ukraine.
She met the legendary perfumier Sofia Grossman who became her mentor and teacher - and after moving to Belgium with her husband, she travelled around the world learning as much as she could. “I became one of the few people with professional training who also had a wide knowledge of Europe, the United States and Asia.” Her command of 17 languages certainly helped.
And then came the full-scale war in Ukraine, the Rooster House had just been published in the UK and America - so Victoria decided to embark on a new book project, uncovering the stories of those who managed to continue creating art and preserving memory and heritage in the areas most badly affected by war. Whereas many literary writers tend to stay in places like Lviv or Kyiv - nowhere seemed off limits to Victoria, who is not only fearless but has the rare ability to talk to all kinds of people, from pensioners selling berries on the side of the road to famous artists and musicians. Her contacts book is exemplary.
She first came to Kramatorsk during a literary residency in Kharkiv, traveling there for a day or two at a time to meet people involved with preserving the city’s cultural heritage, as well as local volunteers. Then, via British volunteer Anna Bowles, she met Bogdan Zuyakov and joined him on an evacuation trip to Druzhkivka to learn more about the work of his team.
In one village, they came to evacuate a lady who lived in a beautiful house, with a garden she had planted herself. The house had been hit by a missile, when fortunately the woman had been away. “It was all so rushed and traumatic, as she tried to collect some things, her cat and some chickens, everything crammed into World Central Kitchen and UNHCR bags. The whole thing really stayed with me”. She realised Bogdan’s team operated purely on private donations and began fundraising through the readers and students she had built up through her perfumery courses and blog.
Now each morning at dawn she gets up, does her skincare regime, puts on body armour and a helmet and heads out with the team down horribly dangerous roads, dodging drone attacks, double tap strikes, mines and fires. Sometimes the people they have come to rescue have already passed away, and their job becomes returning the body as a final act of dignity. Sometimes they arrive at buildings which have just been hit, full of flames and smoke, and their job is to help get the injured to hospital.
It is a long way from life in Brussels and teaching classes at the University of Versailles.
“In the past few months, I have been in all sorts of circumstances”, she says - “each time you learn how to react, and find out how you respond under stress. It’s about controlling panic in the moment and staying focused”. She notices everything: the famous Donbas roses, the bullet marks on the Artem monument in Sviatohirsk, how the architecture in Kramatorsk’s old town reminded her of her current home in Belgium. “I wondered why it had this feeling of provincial Europe. Then I found out many of the buildings had been built by German PoWs after the second world war”.
Perhaps in this front line city, which the Russians seem bent on destroying piece by piece, it is more comforting to dwell in the past than think of the future. “You do have to learn the art of non attachment. You grow close to people, but you don’t know where any of you will be in a week. It is all very fragile and temporary. It feels like home here, but in extremely precarious circumstances. It becomes all the more important to find a source of strength or solace or hope”.
One of those sources of strength is undoubtedly Bogdan and his team and the fact that Victoria has been able to raise such vitally needed funds for an armoured car and constant vehicle repairs. But every day the situation in the towns and villages they visit gets worse and worse. And the danger gets ever closer to home, although in truth nowhere in Kramatorsk is safe. “The other day we helped to evacuate a family with children from the street next to mine. Soon I think there will be a massive exodus from here, although it has not yet started.” She worries that there are such scarce resources to help those who are displaced. “The municipalities and the transit centres are already so stretched, logistically and financially.” It is hard to imagine how they will cope with tens of thousands more.
And so: Victoria lives this life of unbelievable extremes, which can be bleak and terrifying and surreal all at the same time. “One moment you are crying, then you laugh, with the flashes of black humour which fill your day. The smallest things can bring you to tears, something totally stupid or touching.War changes what you find scary or acceptable. Even the rockets are your own, when you are in your own town.”
She has developed ways to combat the stress: she teaches her perfume classes online, she works on her book, she does ballet exercises and reads. And of course, there is Sophie, the calico kitten who Victoria personally rescued from a burning flat in Sloviansk.
“Of course, I had seen so many pictures of rescuers emerging from burning buildings clutching a cat, but I never imagined that one day it would be me”, she says. Sophie is full of boundless kitten energy, enthusiastically knocking over plants, leaping into boxes, chasing pieces of ribbon and poking her face into yours in the early hours of the morning. No-one can be sad for long around Sophie.
And then there is cooking, and Victoria’s commitment to shopping at the fresh food markets, emerging with bags of fat tomatoes, juicy apricots, tiny plums. Even in the darkness of blackouts, she makes a meal an occasion: one night in Kherson, she laid out plates of salad with brynza cheese, the pickles we had bought at a local restaurant decanted into a glass dish, some neat slices of dark rye bread and an enormous Kherson cake, rich with white chocolate cream cheese filling sandwiched between walnut dacquoise.
In Kramatorsk, as the lights suddenly went off, we lit the kitchen with a torch balanced in a water glass, while Victoria cooked some potatoes in butter and rescued some green beans and tomatoes from the lifeless fridge to turn into salad.
A few days ago, she travelled to Kyiv, managing to transport Sophie in a cat carrier to secure a pet passport and all the necessary vaccinations, but also to attend the memorial service for Oleksiy Yukov, the head of the volunteer Platsdarm unit, who devoted the last 12 years to the harrowing but highly necessary task of identifying the bodies of fallen defenders and returning them to their families for a dignified burial. Victoria had spent time with him, closely observing his work - and had grown close to his wife Yevheniia Kaluhina, who headed up the local history museum in their native Sloviansk. There were photos of Victoria laying sunflowers on Yukov’s casket. She stayed into the evening, offering some comfort to his wife. Some days are just unbearable.
Victoria is still in Kramatorsk, spending mornings and often night times in the most appalling places, helping people who are at the very lowest point in their lives. She comes home, plays with Sophie, does some writing and her ballet, and reads poetry and books about mindfulness.
The most difficult thing is all the uncertainty, she says - in a city filled with the heartbreak of destroyed buildings and broken lives, which grows more unrecognisable by the day. But she is documenting it all, perhaps even making some sense of it all. I am certain that her new book, whenever she is able to finish it, will be one of the most important things you will ever read.
You can follow Victoria and subscribe Victoria Belim and donate to her fundraiser for a new evacuation ambulance after the one they use was damaged by an FPV here.
https://gogetfunding.com/humanitarian-support-for-relocating-civilians-in-ukraine/
I think introducing Victoria to Bogdan was one of my best days of work yet!
Thank you for introducing us to yet another Wonder Woman. You all make so many of us believe in humanity again!