The Last Witness

Kolya is lying in a cellar. The only thing separating him from the bare earth is a bit of Styrofoam to protect against the cold. The walls are moldy, the air icy and damp. Kolya wears two pairs of pants on top of each other, two pairs of socks, a cap and he’s wrapped in a blanket, he will later recall. And yet he’s still freezing. It’s March in Mariupol, and temperatures are dropping below zero.

There’s no more electricity and no water. No safety. Barely any food. The Russian army has surrounded the city, and now it is starving the population. Bombs rain from planes, Kolya can even hear them in the basement. A whistling noise followed by a tremendous thunder. The walls tremble as if he were lying in a house of cards that could collapse and bury him at any instant. A bullet recently hit the neighbor’s house and a man died. They buried him in the vegetable patch. They didn’t dare go any further because of the fighting.

Kolya’s sister Polina, 11, is lying next to him in the basement. She snuggles up to her father Vladimir, a slender, serious man. Polina is the youngest of the three children. Varya, 14, lies at Kolya’s feet. Next to her mother Natalia, whose corpulence keeps her warm. Between them is Kolya, who has just turned 17 years old.

He’s not religious, but he is praying right now. In his mind, he will later recall, he speaks the same sentence over and over again: Everything will be alright, we’ll get through this. But he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying. Kolya is certain he’ll die in Mariupol. And his family with him.

Before February 2022, Kolya had been a teenager who had discovered his love for Metallica and dreamed of changing the rigid Ukrainian school system as a civil servant. His sisters Polina and Varya were fond of folk dances and painting. Parents Vladimir and Natalia, both 47 years old, sometimes lacked the energy for three children. But after many conflicts during puberty, Kolya was growing closer to them again.

Today, six months after the start of the Russian war of aggression, they are dead. Polina and Varya, girls with long braids and high cheekbones, were likely killed by debris in the basement of their home. Vladimir, the father, died in the apartment, perhaps he had gone upstairs to get some air. The body of their mother still hasn’t been found to this day, presumably her body got pulverized by the explosion.

The only one still alive is Kolya, a child from whom the war took everything: his home, his family, his future and even his past. He no longer has anything except a pair of jeans and wool socks knitted by his mother. Kolya’s clothes, his identity papers, the people he loves – all these things lie under the rubble of Mariupol. Just like the other tens of thousands killed by Russia in its campaign against Ukraine.

A few days after the invasion in February, the Russian army cut off the city’s connection to the outside world. The network collapses, and it’s not a coincidence. The world isn’t supposed to see what is happening in Mariupol. To this day, there are few images from the city, and Russia has dismissed the ones that do exist propaganda.

But Kolya witnessed what happened in Mariupol. He is able tell you about it without hesitation or faltering, as clearly and distinctly as only someone who has nothing left but their story can. To corroborate his account, DER SPIEGEL spoke to Kolya’s former neighbors and friends. Videos and satellite images provide proof of the destruction of his childhood home. But only Kolya can still report about his family. He says he owes it to them to speak out about what happened. If he couldn’t save them, the world should at least be told how they died.

“My family is from Mariupol, but I was born in Donetsk, on December 19, the day of St. Nicholas. My parents named me after him: Kolya. They had to wait nine years for a child. The fact that they were able to then have daughters gave my parents great joy.

Dad worked in a steel factory and Mom was an accountant. They worked like slaves. Together, they earned 23,000 hryvnia a month, about 600 euros. It was enough for a small house. Varya and I shared a room, Polina slept with Mom. Dad slept on the sofa in the living room.

 He was on shift duty and often had to work at night. He was always tired. Dad and I fought over little things, like the fact that I was supposed to do more to help around the house than my sisters. Today I think: how silly.

In the end, though, I would say the relationship in our family was ideal. All the problems seemed to have dissolved. Maybe also because I had grown up and become more serious. I could understand my parents and sisters better. Our lives had just begun.”

On February 24, a Thursday, Kolya wakes up to go to school. He’s still in bed when, half asleep, he hears his mother tell the girls in the room next door that class has been cancelled. Putin has declared war on Ukraine.

Many people in Mariupol still believe they’re safe. They believe that the troops won’t harm them. Putin allegedly wants to protect the Russian-speaking population with the attack, and it would be hard to find a Ukrainian city that is more Russian than Mariupol. More than 90 percent of the residents speak Putin’s native language in everyday life. Many feel closer to Russia than to Ukraine.

Kolya’s parents count among those people. They grew up in the Soviet Union, they speak Russian with their children and they stay out of politics. Their only desire is a modest, worry-free life. They hardly cared at the time whether that be under the Russian or Ukrainian flag.

During the first hours of the war, Kolya’s family, whose last name will not be used here to protect Kolya’s identity, buys food, but they don’t flee. They wouldn’t even know where to flee to. They’re simple people without relatives or relations abroad. Kolya never left Ukraine before the war. The family decides to ride out the Russian attack like it’s a thunderstorm.

As Kolya and his parents wait in line in the few supermarkets that are still open, the Russian army draws a ring around Mariupol. Already in the first hours, Putin’s military had shelled residential buildings and a school. Nevertheless, three quarters of the inhabitants remain in the city. They trust their “brother people,” who are pretending to protect them.

Kolya’s family is holed up in their building, a one-story structure on a quiet side street. The parents get out games for the children, and Vladimir, the dad, watches “Lord of the Rings” on TV. The shelling is still far away, and they can still tell themselves that the war isn’t affecting them. Kolya leafs through books he would otherwise have no time for because of school. He gets caught up in George Orwell’s “1984,” a story about a country turning into a totalitarian surveillance state. Between explosions, Kolya thinks about how much the plot reminds him of Russia.

“In the early days of the war, we even had online classes. There were explosions outside, but the teacher was talking about how we should do our homework. Everyone believed the Ukrainian army would be able to hold out in Mariupol. That it was only a matter of time before everything would return to normal.

One evening I was watching Star Wars with my friend Vika, with each of us as our own computer. Vika and I know each other from school, we have been a couple for two years. Her family also stayed in Mariupol. We lived only 10 minutes from each other. Visits weren’t possible, but we shared our screen on Skype and watched TV together.

Suddenly, the picture froze and the sound stuttered. I said: Vika, I can’t hear you anymore. Then there was a bang outside, sparks flying in the sky. The power went out.”

The Russians cut more than a dozen power lines in the first weeks of the war. After that, the only things providing warmth were the open fires many lit on their balconies. By now, at the latest, the residents of Mariupol are coming to realize that Russia has deceived them. But it’s too late. The way out of the city is already mined and blocked.

“It was freezing cold at home. We wore four sweaters on top of each other and also wrapped ourselves in blankets. It didn’t help, it was always cold. And then, just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, the water disappeared.

At first, it was still dripping out of the tap. At some point, though, nothing came at all. That was the beginning of the apocalypse – I don’t have any other way of describing it. We lived like savages. We could no longer wash, and instead of a toilet, we used a bucket or plastic bags. To get water, we had to leave the house and go up the street, where there was a spring. The path was dangerous and the water was dirty. We boiled it over the fire. But it still tasted terrible.”

In the beginning, the family still lives in the house, they sleep in their beds and eat at their table. Although the rumblings of war are approaching, their dad initially refuses to prepare the basement as a shelter.

Each family member is confronting the threat differently. Kolya’s dad Vladimir with stoic denial, his mother Natalia with concern for her children. Polina, the youngest, is overcome by nervous hysteria: Instead of crying, she laughs herself silly all the time. Kolya, for his part, shakes uncontrollably, and he is no longer in full control of his hands and legs. He can barely sleep at night out of fear he won’t live to see the morning.

Then a shell strikes their neighborhood for the first time. Screeching, it flies over the building before dropping on its target with a bang. The ground shakes like an earthquake, Kolya feels it too.

The Russians destroy a gas station located only 200 meters away. Why, Kolya asks, would you fire on a gas pump? Russia, he says, explaining the attack, doesn’t even want to leave a few liters of gasoline for the population.

After the attack, the family does move into the basement, which is barely 1.70 meters high. They usually store canned cucumbers and tomatoes here, supplies for the winter. But it has now become the place where they sleep. They find some Styrofoam panels in the garage that they had bought to insulate the house. They lay them on the ground and place all the blankets they can spare on top of them. They only go upstairs to fetch water or to cook on the fire.

Kolya hates the basement. The walls are covered with mold, and there’s barely enough room for the family. But it muffles the sound of the carpet bombing of the city.

“The building shook with every impact. Dust settled on my face. I used to be ashamed of getting close to my parents, but now I wanted to be as close to them as I could. I took turns hugging my Dad’s and Mom’s shoulder, telling them I loved them.

Every day, I was prepared to die – even if I couldn’t understand what for. I was lying in the basement, listening to the explosions and wondering: Why was I brought into this world in the first place? Will I ever accomplish anything to be remembered by? Or if I die now, will it be as if I never even existed?”

Kolya, a child of 17, utters these sentences with the seriousness of an adult. During hours-long interviews with DER SPIEGEL, he doesn’t cry once – he doesn’t even sound accusatory. He just talks about what happened to him, and sometimes it seems as though he’s surprised anyone actually cares.

In the second week of March, Kolya remembers, a Russian rocket hit the building next door. And then further buildings on the street. When the bricks burst from the heat of the explosions, the sound penetrates all the way down into the basement. When, in a quiet moment, Kolya steps out onto the street, the asphalt in front of his door looks as if it has been dug up.

Kolya’s building is also slowly succumbing to the war. A blast wave damages the roof and the windows burst. The chandelier in the living room crashes down, along with part of the ceiling. At one point, an explosion is so powerful that parts of the kitchen walls bury the basement hatch. It’s only with a little luck that the family are able to dig themselves free.

It now just feels like it will only be a matter of time before they die. There are few search teams left in Mariupol. People who are trapped – and there are many – are rarely rescued. People are dying in their basements, in their living rooms, in a school and in the theater where hundreds of people seek refuge. Ninety percent of all buildings in Mariupol are damaged during the war. Anyone who has seen images of the bombing, of rockets indiscriminately launched at the city, inevitably wonders how anyone could survive here.

Vladimir, Kolya’s father, presses himself against the farthest basement wall day and night and stares into space. Kolya’s mom is no longer able to calm the children. Once, she wants to stroke her son’s cheek, whisper to him that everything will be all right, but when Kolya feels his mother’s hand, he collapses. Natalia’s skin is scratchy like sandpaper, scraped up from the debris. She notices his defensiveness and bursts into tears. “Is it my fault our building was bombed?” she cries. Then they cry together, mother and son, both helpless and vulnerable. This moment burns itself into Kolya’s memory – he still remembers every detail months later.

When the Russian shelling subsides somewhat, Kolya musters up his courage. He hasn’t heard from his girlfriend Vika in two weeks, he doesn’t even know if she’s still alive. He decides to take the 10-minute journey to her home to see she she’s doing.

Kolya’s home, part of a quiet residential neighborhood, had seemed especially safe to him at the beginning of the war. But Vika lives in a 14-story building, visible from far away – an ideal target for the Russian army. When he arrives at Vika’s building, it’s almost unscathed.

Of course, there’s no guarantee the people will survive here either. Here, too, people are buried in the yard; and here, too, residents are running out of food. But maybe, Kolya thinks, it would make it easier for him if he lived with Vika for a while. His family would have more room in the basement and one less person depleting the supplies. Vika’s parents agree.

“When I went back home, I said: Mom, I’ll probably move in with Vika. We were totally crammed into the basement. She agreed.

I packed a few things. Then I wanted to say goodbye. I don’t remember what my sister Polina was doing at that moment, but Varya was sitting in the basement, crying. She had always been strong, but she could no longer handle it. I stroked her head and tried to comfort her: We’re going to make it, everything will be OK. Please don’t cry.

When I was almost out the door, I turned back to my father. I said: Dad, I’m leaving now. He had been in a state of shock for days, lying on the floor and breathing heavily. Dad sat up, looked at me and said: ‘Well, go.’ It was the last time I saw my family alive.” 

On March 10, Kolya moves from his parents’ house to his girlfriend Vika’s apartment. Meanwhile, the third week of the Russian war of aggression is raging. The first mass grave is dug in Mariupol. On March 13, the municipal government reports that the last water and food supplies have been consumed.

Vika’s family prepared and have supplies. They stored pasta and grits, and even the gas tank in the kitchen is still filled. Kolya can hear the impacts here, too, but at least he is no longer crouching in the cramped basement, but in a windowless hallway, the safest place in the apartment.

Vika, now 16 years old, seems lively and bubbly, Kolya serious and composed. They both like Nirvana and astrology, wear dark clothes and have a penchant for mysticism. They pass the time by talking about the war: What are the odds that Russia will win?

But it’s a useless endeavor: There has been no mobile phone network and no news for weeks. They can only guess the course of the front. Instead, Kolya and Vika consult their tarot cards. Vika pulls the card with a man standing on a hill, his gaze fixed on a sea full of ships. They conclude that a fleet will come to save Mariupol.

The reality, though, is that Mariupol is falling, district by district. In mid-March, there’s a sudden knock at the door of Vika’s apartment, with a man’s voice demanding in harsh Russian: “Open up! This is an inspection!” Putin’s soldiers are standing at the doorstep. They search the rooms and threaten to take the men away. Kolya is too young for them, and Vika’s father happens to be out looking for food. The Russians are combing all the floors, and shots are fired on one of them. Later, a neighbor tells Kolya that two bodies have been carried out to the street.

The Russian army now controls Vika’s neighborhood, and the shelling shifts to the southwest, where Mariupol’s main military unit, the Azov regiment, is still resisting. The fighters have retreated to the local steel factory, and Kolya’s family lives nearby. When he looks out the window, he sees Russian tanks being refueled and then driving off in the direction of his parents’ house. Kolya says he feels like he was a traitor. As if he had abandoned his family.

That’s also why he decides to stay in Mariupol when Vika and her parents leave the city. Since Russia has control of large parts of the area, it’s possible to get to Crimea. On March 21, his girlfriend gets into the car and drives off. Kolya stays in their apartment on his own.

“When everyone was gone, I burst into tears. I thought: What do I do now? Would it have been better to go with them? But I wanted to wait until my parents showed up. I was sure they would come for me at some point. And then I wanted to be there so they wouldn’t have to worry.

It wasn’t easy living alone in the building. The gas had since run out. I had to cook with fire and I had never done that before. Fortunately, a neighbor helped me. A family that had stayed in Mariupol lived a few floors above Vika. The man’s name was also Kolya. One of his sons spotted me on the balcony trying to make myself something to eat. He told me how to do it, and they also gave me some food later.

One night, it was March 24, I dreamed about my parents. I saw my father standing in the yard of our building. He had no arms left, as if someone had chopped them off. I screamed: ‘Dad, Dad, what have they done to you?’ Then I woke up. I didn’t know what the dream meant.”

The next day Kolya asks a neighbor to accompany him to his parents’ house. It’s a potentially deadly journey because of the fighting, but he wants to see how his family is doing. By now, all the remaining residents know the boy who lives alone on the fourth floor. The neighbor, a devout Christian, agrees to go with Kolya during a a break in the shelling. They say a last prayer and then they set off running.

They head in the direction of the Prospect of Metallurgists, a central avenue that was leafy during more peaceful times and filled with neon signs. Now buildings are shot up, trees have fallen and street lights are strewn all over the place. There isn’t a human in sight.

The first streets in Kolya’s neighborhood give him hope: The homes are battered but not destroyed. He sneaks around mines left by the army along the way. Finally, he’s standing in front of the gate to his house.

At first, he thinks: everything as usual. Then he looks again – and realizes that his parents’ home is no longer standing. Meter-high chunks of stone are piled up where the dining room once stood, the ground is churned up like a field. Bricks are lying on the wood, the ground and on pieces of furniture. Kolya’s home, the place where he spent his whole life, looks like someone ran it through a meat grinder.

“I looked at the ruins and didn’t grasp what had happened. I called for Mom, for my Dad, for my sisters. I ran around the house looking for the basement hatch, trying to squeeze through the rubble to them. But it couldn’t be done, it was too tight.

Suddenly, the neighbor said: ‘Kolya, look, there is a piece of clothing or a toy. What is that?’ I looked, it really looked like clothing, perhaps with fur trim. I moved closer and realized: It was Dad. He was lying face down, most of his body buried. Only his hands and head stuck out. His eyes were squeezed shut, his nose broken. He looked as if he had aged decades.

I began to dig for him with my hands. I was certain: If I managed to get him out, he would get up and run. But then I touched him with my fingers and his body was completely cold and hard. My Dad no longer felt like a person, but like a bag of dirt.

I lost it. I screamed, I cried. I yelled that I loved him. That I was sorry because I didn’t say goodbye the way I should have. Because I really thought this war wasn’t going to hit us.”

In the days that followed, Kolya tried to shovel his family out with the help of neighbors. One helper recorded the rescue attempts on a mobile phone: You see people pressing against the concrete with spades and metal rods. They couldn’t do it. Only an excavator could lift the debris. And there have been no excavators to dig out people buried in Mariupol for a long time.

Videos of a rescue attempt like this are also a rarity. In Mariupol, where there is no electricity, most mobile phones are out of juice. But a neighbor in Vika’s apartment building deals in electronics and happens to have a solar panel. He regularly charges his phone on it and films what is happening around his building. Dozens of recordings document the Russian siege. One of them shows Kolya standing in the ruins of his parents’ home, his face frozen with shock. As he and the neighbors try to make their way to the basement, loud bangs can be heard above them.

“I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to look for my mother and sisters, but I thought: If we stay here any longer, I’ll wind up getting us all killed. And even if we make it to the basement, the chances that Mom, Polina and Varya are still alive are slim. People in the other buildings said the rocket hit our house on March 17. That was more than a week ago.

I squeezed through the rubble with a flashlight, almost to the basement. The hatch was slightly open. I called out, but no one answered. I saw that there were bricks in the entrance to the basement. I couldn’t see any people.

I briefly held out hope that maybe Mom and the girls weren’t in the house when it was hit. That they had gone to church to pray or something. But I also had to realize that this was unlikely. If Dad was in the house, then Mom and my sisters were there too.

I realized that we would not find them alive. And that we had to stop digging for them so we wouldn’t die as well.

I wish I had come sooner and brought them over to where I was staying. I could have saved them. I felt so guilty.”

Kolya returns to his parents’ house only once after that. He has a homemade sign with him: a peg, broken from the door of an abandoned daycare center, along with a piece of wood he found. He writes the names of his family on it with a black felt-tip pen: Vladimir. Natalia. Varya. Polina. Born between 1974 and 2010. Died on March 17, 2022.

Kolya takes a brick and hammers the sign into the ground in front of the destroyed house, as a message to the Russians, who have since also taken control over this part of the city. They will begin removing the rubble, and they should know that there are still people under the concrete. Kolya hopes that they will dig up and bury the bodies of his family. But probably, he thought at the time, they would throw them away like garbage.

After Kolya puts up the sign, he once again sees his father lying among the rubble. The sun is shining over the city now, spring is getting closer. The bodies are starting to decompose and Kolya can smell it.

He climbs over the debris of his family home looking for something to cover his father with. Amidst the rubble, he finds a green down jacket that belonged to his sister Varya. There’s a video of it: Kolya asked his neighbor to record the impact site. He doesn’t want anyone to be able to claim later that he made all this up.

It shows Kolya throwing the jacket over the corpse of his father. He looks for a second garment in the rubble and places it over Vladimir’s head. After that, he leaves the destroyed building and walks away, perhaps forever.

Why did Kolya’s family have to die? According to international law, civilians are given special protection in war. But no price was too high for Russia’s army to conquer Mariupol. The soldiers shelled residential areas and hospitals, escape routes and shelters. It was intended to make Mariupol residents feel unsafe wherever they were. It looked like chaos, but it was calculated hell.

A hell that Kolya has been left to deal with alone. His family is dead, his hometown destroyed. A young man left to cope with this catastrophe on his own. He spends three days in Vika’s apartment: He remembers crying, beating the floor with his fists and convulsing. There’s still no electricity, no water, barely any food. Kolya knows he can’t survive without help.

The neighbors living a few stories above him turn out to be his salvation. The father of the family, who share’s Kolya’s name suggests: “Move in with us. We’ll take care of you.”

“His son had once helped me to make a fire and his wife told me how to boil noodles. Otherwise, I barely knew the family. But the man immediately said: ‘You no longer have a father, so I will be like your father. We won’t leave you alone.’

He and his children were there when we tried to dig out my family. They were the worst moments of my life, and they experienced them with me. That brought us closer together. I also had no choice: I had no one and nowhere to go back to.

The fighting in Vika’s neighborhood ceased in April, but everything was destroyed. No one knew if civilization would return in a month or in a year. So, the family that had taken me decided to leave Mariupol. They had a few cans of gasoline on hand and two cars that were riddled with shrapnel but still roadworthy. We left on April 18.” 

From the windows of the car, the buildings they drive past look like Armageddon. Entire sections of the city are burning, cars are shot up and turned over. Kolya remembers an “atmosphere of death,” with mines lying all over the road. And his fear of not surviving as they escaped. But they make it to the front line, the border between Russian-occupied territories and Ukraine.

In the town of Manhush, the family waits for a week in a line of cars of the people fleeing. Hundreds are waiting for Russia soldiers to conduct checks on their cars. When the time comes, many men are taken away, but Kolya and his neighbors are lucky. Because they have Ukrainian and Russian citizenship, the soldiers wave them through. Kolya, the teen in the back seat, goes unnoticed.

He only remembers some of the rest of the trip. He no longer knows how he found out about their destination, nor how they got the to border with the European Union. Nor how the officials waved him through even though he has no identification papers – they burned in Mariupol. He only knows that he arrived in early May in a country he had never heard of. A green and quiet place, surrounded by mountains. We are not publishing the exact place where Kolya lives in order to protect his privacy.

Since July 2022, Kolya has been living in a refugee shelter, with six people sharing a few square meters. The family with whom he fled Mariupol lives there with him. It’s cramped, but Kolya is happy he’s not alone. The conversations with his rescuers keep him in the present, like an anchor that prevents the past from sweeping him away.

He calls it “losing touch with reality,” and it happens to him a lot. When it does, he no longer sees the meadow in front of his house or the blue sky, but instead the ruins of Mariupol. The worst, Kolya says, is when he lies awake at night. He then stares at the ceiling above his bunk bed, and in his eyes, the room becomes the basement where his family died. 

“I miss Dad most of all, maybe because I saw him dead. I remember how he laughed and how I hugged him. He was very warm and soft. Later, when I found him, he was so cold.

What were Dad, Mom and my sisters thinking at the moment of the explosion? Did they have time to realize that this was the end for them? Did they feel fear? I imagine what it would have been like to be with them. Then I get scared.”

Mariupol has been fully under Russian control since May 20. There’s still no water in many places, and residents collect it from puddles using buckets. Dead bodies aren’t recovered by search teams, but by volunteers who receive food in return. Some young men have recently been forced to do military service and fight against Ukraine, their own country.

Kolya knows this – he follows every report from the city. On the only table in his room, there is a laptop that is almost always showing the news. He manages not to let the reports get to him too badly. People who have experienced trauma often compartmentalize what they have experienced afterward, and perhaps this explains Kolya’s composure. There are two Kolyas: The one who lies awake at night thinking about death. And the one who tries to look ahead so that he doesn’t break.

Kolya is now attending six-hours a day of language school. He bought himself a guitar, and the seller even gave him a discount when he heard that Kolya was Ukrainian. He spends his free time doing homework and dealing with the bureaucracy of his new country. And with Vika, his girlfriend, who against all the rules of probability is with him again.

He calls her just before he leaves Mariupol. He tells her that he’s alive and that he loves her – then the connection breaks off. The next time they talk by phone, Kolya has already reached Western Europe.

Vika’s family is living in Crimea at this time, but they don’t want to stay there. On the phone, Kolya asks her to come to him. Vika agrees. At the end of May they fall into each other’s arms at the train station, and there’s a video of that moment.

Vika now lives with her mother in a hotel rented for refugees from Ukraine. It’s located just a few streets away from Kolya’s accommodation. They are attending the same language school and spend time together every day.

They formed a band together with other refugee kids, with the local youth center providing instruments. When Kolya is on stage there, he smiles between songs. He teases Vika, who only recently started playing drums, when she can’t keep up. In the evenings, they sometimes ride bikes that people had thrown away to McDonald’s and eat fries.

Kolya says he owes it to Vika that he’s still alive. He says that when he feels her gaze, it grounds him again, brings him back to the present. Then he’s able to focus on today and push yesterday away.

Kolya has two wishes for the future. One goes like this: He wants to become an interpreter and rent an apartment, move in with Vika and marry her. He wants to do his family proud, even if they weren’t able to live long enough to see it.

The second wish is about Mariupol. Someday, Kolya would like to walk along the sea there again. He wants to show his children where he lived and where their grandparents died. He wants to see his hometown in peace and in Ukrainian hands.

Kolya knows that moment may never come. There are rumors that Russia is planning to annex the city, which would make it unreachable for Kolya. Posters are already hanging in the streets emblazoned with the words: “Russia is here forever.”

A relative still holding out in the city recently wrote Kolya that helpers had recovered the bodies of his father and sisters. They have since been buried in a mass grave. Kolya hopes to one day be able to search for them and give them a proper burial.

The eye of the whale

The octopus sat on a stone, wrapped in her own arms. An amber eye glistened amid the soft red of her flesh. I swam up closer, she was within arm’s reach. Her eye widened, unveiling a pupil shaped like a straight horizontal line.

I could see her clearly. And she could see me.

What is it about encounters with wild animals that makes them stay with us forever? Aldo Leopold, father of the ecological concept in philosophy, recounted that one look into the eyes of a dying wolf – into its wild, green fire that, when extinguished, would take with it secrets known only to wolves and to the mountains – transformed him from a hunter into a staunch defender of the wilderness.

Jane Goodall said that the most important experience of her life was the moment when David Greybeard, one of the chimpanzees she observed, looked her straight in the eye. She was holding her hand out to him with some fruit, which he took, yet dropped it to the ground. That wasn’t what he wanted. Instead, he lightly squeezed Jane’s hand. “In that moment we communicated in a way that seemed to predate words. Perhaps in a way that was used by our common ancestor millions of years ago,” she recounted on the radio programme “To The Best Of Our Knowledge”.

Photographer Bryant Austin recalls floating in the water when he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. He turned and looked straight into the eye of a female humpback whale. Her fin weighs a tonne and is almost five metres long. And yet she only gently touched him. Her eye was brightly lit; Austin saw a calm awareness in it. He devoted the next five years to photographing whales on a 1:1 scale.

My encounter with the octopus ended with us taking a walk together – she leapt from rock to rock and looked back to see if I was following her. And while this meeting of minds did not decide my life path, it had an effect on my diet and left a trace that I think will stay with me forever. The sight of her eye comes back to me along with the feeling that I have been noticed and recognised – as a creature with consciousness and a will, unpredictable and therefore interesting.

In that split second when we gazed at each other – a round pupil and a rectangular pupil – I was an animal being watched by another animal. Looking at me, she saw the same thing I saw looking at her. A glimpse of alien consciousness hidden in the pupil of an eye.

Parallel lives

“The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary”, wrote John Berger in the late 1970s in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” According to the British art critic, what we have in common with animals is birth, sentience and death. Man and animal are “similar, but not identical […]. Just because of this distinctness, however, an animal’s life, never to be confused with a man’s, can be seen to run parallel to his. […] With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.”

I understand the “companionship” of which Berger writes to be the gaze of a being that reveals its individuality, its singularity to us.

The sense that we are being watched by a “wild” animal (wildness is the key point here: a domesticated animal, according to Berger, cannot offer us its own narrative, because it occupies a place in ours), that we have been noticed by it, can be cause for shock. Suddenly we grasp the vastness of the world – the multitude of beings, each enclosed within a skin, each unique and each alone in that uniqueness. We feel an acute loneliness mixed with a sense that we are not as alone as we think.

The whale as an icon

The heart of a blue whale weighs as much as a Fiat 126p[1]. The sounds made by sperm whales are louder than a rocket taking off into space. Humpbacks can travel up to 25,000 kilometres in one year, moving between the tropics and the poles. And Cuvier’s beaked whales can dive to a depth of three kilometres (the human record on a single breath is 214 metres) and spend as much as two hours underwater.

The whale’s giant body is a representation of the world. During its lifetime, it reacts to magnetic storms on the sun and influences the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. When it dies, it becomes a feast for hundreds of species of sea creatures for several decades or even centuries.

Although whales evolved from dog-like land mammals that entered the ocean 50 million years ago, everything about them is epic, beyond human scale. What do we see when we look into the eye of the world’s largest creature?

The book by Australian journalist Rebecca Giggs, “Fathoms: The World in the Whale”, has taken me on a journey through time, cultures, and genres. The author writes that “a whale’s eye is looking, unexpectedly. Its vigilance seems to resemble ours – thoughtful, inquiring, knowing. […] Making eye contact with a whale runs a deeper taproot into the human psyche than catching the eye of another sort of animal. They don’t want your attention. They’re searching inside you. For what? What is it that migrates with the look passing from whale to human, human to whale?”

Giggs is not interested in the size of a fin whale’s tongue or the reproductive behaviour of sperm whales. Rather, the whale interests her as an icon. What does it mean to kill a whale, to eat a whale, to watch a whale suffer, to hear a whale, to be in a whale, to dream of whales, to stroke a whale to death?

It is an erudite and at times meditative journey into the depths of humanity. Whales are a mirror in which we have been seeing our reflection for thousands of years. For some, they were harbingers of divine tidings, for others, the source of the oil that fuelled the industrial revolution. For most people today, they are the story of the ability for humans to change.

The whale song

We associate whaling with creaking wooden ship decks and Captain Ahab from Moby Dick. Yet most of the whales did not die in the 19th century, when whalers were after their oil (used as a lubricant and fuel for street lamps), their baleen (used to make umbrellas or corsets and to beat naughty children) and their bone (for buttons and the keys of musical instruments).

We culled the most whales in the 20th century, when advanced technology, finely lubricated with whale fat, made it possible for us to sail faster and further. Large ships, or more like floating factories, appeared in the oceans, on board of which the great carcasses could be processed and their blubber rendered. Whales were no longer impaled by steel harpoons but by explosive charges. It is estimated that from 1900 to 1999, humans killed 3 million whales – more than in all previous centuries combined. During a single century, the blue whale population declined from 300,000 to 2,300 individuals. The global humpback population shrank by 90 percent, and as many as 770,000 sperm whales were killed in the second half of the 20th century alone.

Today, when we board a cruise ship hoping with crossed fingers to see a whale, we are going to see a rescued animal. “[…] it’s a double marvel,” Giggs says. “The spectacle of witnessing immense animals, unhindered in their marine habitats, offered hand in glove with a chance to contemplate our own species’ capacity for temperance […]. To spot a whale is to animate a redemption narrative; to reflect on the supposed moral turnabout of our kind. We wonder at our ability to command nature to such decimating ends. We wonder, too, at our capacity for control ourselves.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, whales became a symbol of the environmental struggle. Following a series of high-profile oil spills and the first photograph of Earth from space (taken in 1972 by the Apollo 17 crew, it depicted a solitary blue sphere in the vast blackness of space), the green movement began to take off. Whales had capacious symbolic value, embodying the struggle to save endangered species and to reduce pollution, and the fight for the right to clean air. The animal that had previously been seen as the source of blubber to make margarine and soap, now became a symbol of protecting the planet, thanks to a major international effort.

The whale song made a major contribution here. In times of war, it had been treated as noise that disrupted the search for enemy boats. Yet thanks to activists and artists, it was later transformed into proof of the intelligence of a different species. A whale song album, released on vinyl by biologist Roger Payne, sold more than 10 million copies. When a whaling ban was being debated in the US Congress in 1972, in place of boring speeches, activists simply played a recording of a humpback whale singing.

Thanks to the 1986 international ban on commercial whaling, the population of blue whales has increased and is now estimated to number between 10,000 and 25,000 individuals. There are now between 80,000 and 100,000 humpbacks and 300,000 sperm whales. Giggs believes that we saved them in order to save ourselves.

Our world in the whale

In the whales, Rebecca Giggs finds a story of last-minute remorse and self-transformation. And much more than just that.

Golf balls. Twenty plastic bags. A dozen metres of crab fishing net. Tracksuit bottoms. Pieces of a plastic bucket. Chicken packaging from Ukraine. Birthday party cups. An entire flattened greenhouse. Disposable cigarette lighters.

Our entire world in the single whale.

Our world in whale blubber, half a metre thick. Pesticides that have been long banned yet entered the sea decades ago are deposited in the tissues of cetaceans. They do not harm the animal until it begins to digest the fat – and during long migrations, fat is its only food. Or until it turns the blubber into milk. The mother whale does not understand what killed her calf.

Our world in the changing tones of the whale’s songs, which have to cut through the noise of container ships with engines reaching five storeys in height and weighing 2,300 tonnes.

Our world in the skinny bodies of humpbacks that are suffering from food shortages in the increasingly acidic waters of the ocean.

Our world in beached whales: 337 whales were beached off Chile in 2015, 656 in New Zealand in 2017 (around 200 were rescued), 470 in Tasmania in 2020 (20 were rescued). Some had been poisoned by toxic algae, others stunned by military sonar.

Our world in China’s Yangtze River, where excessive traffic and over-fishing were too much for the baiji, a dolphin species endemic to this river. The last one was seen in 2004. It was declared extinct in 2006.

Our world in the fading sounds of the Antarctic BW29. It is a never-seen species – or perhaps a single individual, maybe a hybrid – whose voice has been picked up by the hydrophones of scientists. There are more recordings of other such sounds that do not match any known cetacean species. Some die away before we can discover to whom they belonged.

Giggs looks at the whale and sees what is invisible to us on a daily basis: global warming, toxins, increasing acidification of seawater, noise pollution and  plastic pollution. We read about these things in the media, but we are unable to fully register their scale.

Timothy Morton, author of Dark Ecology, calls such phenomena hyperobjects – something impossible to describe because they are so huge, yet things we are heavily entangled in. They are all around us, they are in us, they are us.

It turns out that all it takes is a good look at other species and the invisible begins to take on a shape. Looking at whales helps us to experience and feel, not just understand – the extent of our impact on the Earth.

In the boat together

“Everywhere animals disappear” – wrote John Berger in 1977. Although he was concerned with the marginalisation of animals and their perspectives, he could not have foreseen that the sixth extinction was already underway. Animals were disappearing not just from our sight, but from our world. It is estimated that there are 60 percent less wild animals today than in 1970. They now account for only 4 percent of the mammalian biomass – the rest is humans and livestock. According to the 2019 report of IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), one million species (yes: species, not individuals) are threatened with extinction. Scientists estimate that there are roughly eight million species in total, most of which are insects. Many of these have yet to be discovered and described. They will be lost before we even find out anything about them.

In recent decades, as much as three quarters of the Earth’s land surface and 66 percent of the seas have been transformed under human influence. We have almost completely destroyed wetlands (85 percent). We have deforested nearly a fifth of the land. And our consumption keeps increasing. Andrew Deutz of the Nature Conservancy calculated in 2021 that we spend more money today on destroying nature than on protecting it.

Many believe that the loss of biodiversity, symbolised by pictures of Chinese people pollinating pear trees with paintbrushes, is an even greater threat to our species than global warming (the two phenomena are closely linked and interdependent). By losing the diversity of life on the planet, we weaken entire ecosystems. A disturbed balance does not just mean fewer ladybirds and frogs. It is a rupture of the networks of dependencies that sustain our existence on Earth.

One such network is formed by whales, phytoplankton and ourselves, among other things. Cetaceans fertilise the upper parts of the ocean so that microscopic plants can grow on the surface of the water, producing more than half of the oxygen present in the air we breathe. A thought we do not like to embrace is the fact that Homo sapiens is just another species of fauna, dependent on others – and thus could also become endangered.

As the philosopher Andrzej Marzec points out in his book “Anthropocene. Philosophy and Aesthetics after the End of the World”, ultimately, THEIR extinction is OUR demise.

How to cook in a time of scarcity

The speculative exhibition “Mitigation of Shock” prepared by UK-based design studio Superflux was shown in Barcelona in 2017 and Singapore in 2019. Superflux envisions a not-so-distant future: it presents the interior of an apartment in the second half of the 21st century. The view from the window shows flooded streets and high-rise buildings with balconies turned into vegetable gardens. In the kitchen is a jar with a portion of rice for five weeks. Ration cards for sugar and electricity are laid out on the table. On the bookshelf, we have “Pets as Protein”, “Feast for Free. Foraging in Pulau Ujong”, or “How to Cook in a Time of Scarcity”. Pinned over the countertop is a recipe for a roach stir fry. In the corner, we see a small ultraviolet tomato farm and a DIY hydroponic kit made from Ikea boxes with green seedlings. And at the entrance, we have a rack adorned with spears made from hangers and sharp pieces of plastic – repurposed CDs and computer chips.

In the description, the authors invited guests to “experience a world where extreme weather conditions, economic uncertainty and a broken global supply chains mean widespread resource scarcity”. I saw the exhibition the week before Covid-19 hit Italy.

Two years later at the Venice Architecture Biennale – held under the motto “How will we live together?” – Superflux presented a table hosting a post-apocalyptic feast. A fox, a pig, a snake, a raven and bees are seated next to a human at a piece of wood salvaged from some cataclysmic event. They feast using mangled cutlery pieced together from fragments of the human era and discuss the new rules of the game.

Are we ready for this? How much more evidence do we need that the world around us, along with our narrative about it, is crumbling to pieces?

Myopia

When Giggs looked into the eye of a humpback whale, she felt as if the cetacean’s gaze had frozen time. Only moments before, she had watched in horror as the seventeen-metre-long animal glided beneath the catamaran filled with people holding binoculars. One flick of the tail and they would all have been in the water. Giggs understood what it felt like to be the prey. But when this female humpback positioned herself alongside the boat and turned her eye to look straight at the journalist – fear gave way to awe. Today, contact with animals gives us something far more, Giggs says, quoting writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich who explains it as experiences that  “people have more commonly sought through meditation, fasting, and prayer…”

So the animal’s gaze is a window into the solitude (and extinction) of a species, a spiritual experience, a symbol, a mirror.

The only thing is that the humpback whale – like other cetaceans – is myopic, at least by our standards. Above the waterline it is probably unable to distinguish much detail. From a distance of several metres, this particular whale would not have been able to see Giggs’ eyes staring into hers, much less freeze time by the sheer power of her gaze.

When we talk about how we observe animals, we are duplicating our own narrative. We see ourselves in them, because we are the ones weaving the story. In the story, each animal – a wolf, chimpanzee, or octopus – can become a mirror, and indeed a spiritual experience and an impetus for self-transformation, if we are willing to look closely enough. But instead of seeing ourselves in them, can we see them for who they are?

After all, the point should not be for animals to serve a narrative about ourselves, even if it does lead to a glorious personal epiphany. Yes, it’s important to see our own destructive power in the eyes of animals. But to me it seems even more important to see the animal itself.

A story about killing

In the 1980s, the eminent writer Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018), gave a lecture that was later published as an essay entitled “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”. The author, a specialist in alternative perspectives, writes about the origins of narrative. In her view, human storytelling originated from boredom – it was used to fill the time around the campfire. But how do you tell a fascinating story about pulling up root vegetables? A chilling tale about chasing a mammoth with a spear promised much more of thrill – it was full of testosterone, risk, death, victory and heroism.

In fact, hunting mammoths was not an absolute necessity. Our ancestors did just fine on a diet of berries, nuts, and grubs, besides the occasional mammoth. But in addition to the meat, the mammoth hunters brought back a story. According to Le Guin, it is this story – linear and adventurous, involving a kill made with a long, simple tool and, above all, with a Hero – that has dominated human culture for several thousand years. And while the story also features other characters, it is not their story.

The author further explains that “so long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. […] Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.”

Le Guin is not interested in the story of the Ascent of Man the Hero. “You just go on telling the story of how the mammoth fell on Boob, how Cain fell on Abel, and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki […],” she quips and leaves the heroes to themselves while goes out to pick berries, nuts and rootlets. She stashes them in a carrier bag, takes them home, shares them with others and make preserves for the winter. In doing so, she discovers that humankind’s first tool was not a spear at all, and the first story was not the one about thrusting that spear into the heart of a mammoth. The first tool was a container – a rolled-up leaf, a woven basket, a bag. And in this story of the origins of humanity, Le Guin finds herself. “If that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”

If we were to listen to the berry-gatherer, the story would resemble a bag in which each object has something engaging to recount. As he tells the story, he pulls the objects out in no particular order, with no particular purpose, because the purpose is to be together, to listen, to delight and to gain knowledge.

Hero worship

“Conferences may have replaced the campfire, but the principle is basically the same: it’s the story, the legend [and the Hero], that matters,” writes Siobhan Leddy for “Outline”, in comment to Le Guin’s text in 2019.

Two years later, I am observing the international leaders and delegates in October [2021] at the virtual UN Biodiversity Conference in Kunming, and in November at the face-to-face UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. Leaving aside the obvious futility of holding the two summits separately, it is clear that what was supposed to be a great success has turned into a game of words and petty politicking.

The representatives of Tuvalu talked in Glasgow about their sinking islands and how in a few decades they might not have land on which to be a nation. Yet when the Polish prime minister spoke about a just transition and ensuring citizens’ security, he was not really thinking of the citizens of that remote archipelago (it isn’t without reason that Poland was given the title of Fossil of the Day in Glasgow by environmental campaigners for holding on to coal-based power).

Activists who demand bolder action are shut out of the negotiations at such summits. Decisions are made too slowly because our world’s dominant narrative is one of economic growth. Nothing will change until we rid ourselves of the cult of the Hero who slashes, stabs and kills. And the linear narrative needs to go down with him as well. Today’s heroism involves making enough room for the stories of others. Perhaps they are not as heroic and engaging, although this may just be a question of habit. Yes, it may be difficult to tell an intriguing and passionate story about gathering roots. But it is not impossible.

A lot of treasures have accumulated in my bag over the last few months. I read about fungi, bacteria, trees, lichens, jellyfish and termites. I have no idea where this sudden fascination for biology comes from, but I’m unable to digest anything else. I prefer the drama of ants, in which a predatory fungus takes control of the brain, to human drama. I find myself reaching for the stories that exist alongside ours, written by people who are specialists in giving up their space for others: Anna Tsing, Ed Yong, Donna Haraway, and thus learning about the web of interconnectedness. No story exists in a void. After all, the mammoth story, in addition to Oob and Boob, features a mammoth. And then there’s the tree from which the spear was carved, and the berries, and the roots that both hunter and prey fed on. And this is only a tiny art of the relationship, the most visible one.

With each species that goes extinct – the Spix’s macaw, the northern white rhino, the Hawaiian snail, the cetacean and the lice that live on it – a narrative in Le Guin’s carrier bag is lost. Along with each of them, we lose a way of life on Earth that had evolved over millions of years. We become poorer, being deprived of yet another narrative about a relationship with our environment.

“It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end,” Le Guin wrote in 1986. “Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us […] think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it.”

A monument to disappearance

For Berger, the history of Homo sapiens is a story of the separation from animals and their perspective.

Animals were once messengers of the divine, whose livers revealed the future to fortune-tellers. At the same time their behaviour shaped our language (try to cross out all the animal metaphors out of the Iliad – you won’t have much left). Then they became the companions of our day-to-day lives, and in the end we crammed them into cages at the zoo against the backdrop of painted images of palm trees and swamps. Here they stare out with unseeing eyes, skimming over the faces of the people filing past them as if they were a museum exhibit. In such conditions, there is no way to exchange meaningful glances.

Wildness is now something we see in television and at the zoo, Berger believes. We have turned into spectators. The more we know, the further we move away from animals and animality. We no longer have any need to make eye contact with them. Berger argues that the gaze of a beast has become a cause for concern, even horror, in Western civilisation. After all, Homo sapiens is cultured, not just another type of fauna. To look into the eyes of a wild animal is to trigger a form of species-related narcissism, to prove how far we have come.

“[The animals] in zoos […] constitute the living monument to their own disappearance,” Berger concludes. In his view, this disappearance is the last metaphor given to us by wild species. The zoo is a place that marginalises. “All sites of enforced marginality – ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps – have something in common with zoos,” Berger argues.

And he adds without pausing: “it is both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol,”  as if wanting to justify the idea to which his reasoning leads. By marginalising the wild animal, by depriving it of its power to make us aware of our origins, we marginalise our own animality. “The rejection of dualism [of our nature] is probably an important factor in opening the way to modern totalitarianism,” he concludes.

What is left when we kill the animal in us? A terrifying thought.

Four in the morning

In the past, saving whales from extinction was about saving our morality. Today, saving the world is about saving Homo sapiens.

“The animal inside, the creature that quakes at what twitches beyond the campfire light; that animal, too, needs protection.” For me, this is one of the most shocking phrases in Giggs’s book. “When there are no places unfathomed by technology, when wilderness is excoriated in its entirety, something inherent to our humanness is also lost. We kill off the animal in ourselves, the part that belongs to the wildlife. We extinguish a species of wonder.”

For Homo sapiens, the threat is the human being.

The whales lead Giggs into yet another space. It is a space of twilight, four o’clock in the morning and a shore shrouded in mist. You may spot a humpback in the distance, its gleaming back, the flash of a great fin. Some will swear they saw a monster. Others will try to prove that it’s just a whale entangled in fishing nets.

But Giggs listens carefully to those who see monsters, because there is an important truth in the seemingly crazy desire to protect non-existent beasts. Are we capable of protecting what we have not yet recognised? A heroic act of restraint in the name of the invisible? If only to leave ourselves a chance for discovery, for delight, for mystery. Just so that the unnamed, the unexplored, the unknowable, the unconquered, the uncontrollable can exist alongside us.

I would take the matter even further: are we able to stand back? Whether we save the world depends not only on our effort to save it, but also on the effort to take one step back and make room for other creatures’ stories. To recognise them as legitimate, worthy of being heard and being saved. To see in animals beings who are like us, whose knowledge of the world developed over thousands, indeed millions, of years. If we were to abandon our species-related narcissism and just started to listen, what would a whale, a wolf, a chimpanzee or an octopus tell us?

[1] The First 126p was a very popular small car produced in Poland between 1972 and 2000. It became an icon especially during the period of the Polish People’s Republic It weighs around 630 kg.

Translation by Voxeurop and Mark Ordon.