The Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, 37, who was injured by a Russian missile while having dinner last Tuesday at the Ria Lounge, a pizzeria in Kramatorsk, died this Saturday, according to the PEN Club in the early hours of Monday. She is the author of two novels, a cheerleader for the literary scene in her country and a moral spokesperson for her population, she leaves an unpublished book on war crimes in Ukraine.
Amelina, after the Kyiv book fair, decided to accompany the writer Héctor Abad Faciolince and the journalist Catalina Gómez Ángel to the Donetsk region, where she would end up finding her death. An area that is the scene of several passages of his only work so far translated into Spanish, the novel A home for Dom narrated by a dog who witnesses the adventures of its owners, the family of a Soviet colonel who lives in the years 90 in the same building as the writer Stanislaw Lem. The play is set in Ukraine, Russia, Germany and Poland.
Its editor, José Manuel Cajigas – who found out about the author by contacting some Ukrainians residing in the US who had a book club – explains that the local PEN Club, directed by Tetyana Teren, confirms that “during this At the same time, Victoria worked on her first non-fiction book, written directly in English, Diary of War and Justice: Watching Women Watching War, soon to be published, in which she tells stories of Ukrainian women who are documenting the crimes Russian war soldiers, and their lives during the war.
Amelina, born in Lviv (Lviv, in Ukrainian), was a computer programmer and published her first novel, The November Syndrome, in 2015. She had also written for children and, in 2012, she founded the New York Literature Festival, in the Ukrainian city of that name, in the metropolitan area of ??Toretsk (Donetsk), which was suspended last year because of the war.
Cajigas recalls that “she has been a year and a half incorporated into the columns of Doctors Without Borders to record the constant violations of human rights against the civilian population, people often without training, unable to denounce due to ignorance of the procedure, people who have witnessed how a neighbor was murdered, a daughter raped or a child kidnapped in the Donbas, both Russian soldiers and mercenaries or Ukrainian soldiers, because criminals in uniform carry out these atrocities. She told us, at the last London fair, in April, her desire for these people to know that there was going to be a time when these crimes would be judged, that the law would be applied. It was not a question of revenge but of justice. She often faced the mistrust of these people, her struggle was to transfer the hope that invaded her to others, taking note of each criminal act in a way that would allow them to be judged later ”. The writer worked with the Truth Hounds organization and said that “the most frequent crimes that we document are torture and kidnapping of inhabitants in the occupied territories.”
“I was optimistic,” continues Cajigas, “I was confident that Ukraine would win and that Putin would lose power.” “That will be enormously positive for the Russians,” said the author, “just as the Germans needed Hitler to disappear in order to become a civilized and open society.” Her editor points out that “she did not have a Manichean vision, she put the human being above all else.”
For Cajigas, “the officer who gave the order to fire that missile is not a soldier but a criminal, because they knew perfectly well where the two projectiles were going to fall, directed with precise coordinates to a place where there was only a civilian population and where there are no no warehouse or anything that serves for war. That is prohibited by all international conventions and treaties. She has been the victim of one of the war crimes that she so persecuted ”.
In A Home for Dom, a graffiti that became popular after the death of a rock musician is evoked. “People wrote on the walls that he was still alive,” says Cajigas. Now we express it the same way: ‘Victoria lives! Victoria zhyvy!’”.
