Small Kernel of Human Kindness

It’s more than six weeks since the war started and the world has changed so much. Not only the big world but also the small one I see every day. Tallinn looks different and Tallinn feels different. There are some 28 000 war refugees living in Estonia now and most of them, I would imagine, are here in Tallinn. So when you go out on a sunny Sunday afternoon, you mostly hear Slavic languages being spoken around you (my ear does not always catch the difference between Russian and Ukrainian). There are so many mothers and grannies and children, clutching their teddy bears, wandering around the Old Town. A young woman who speaks no English gives me a piece of torn paper on a street that says „Ask for an apartment, Tallinn city council“ and I manage to find the right address for her on Google Maps. There’s a Ukrainian lady who works in our school kitchen now, cleaning the tables and helping out. She always says „Tere!“ in the morning when I see her. I have no idea what she did in her real life before coming here. There’s a young girl who had a flower shop in Kyiv and who happened to be in Poland on February 24th, making arrangements to receive 20 000 tulips for the International Women’s Day in March (it is a massive celebration in the Slavic cultures). She never went back but came straight to Tallinn from Poland (with a toothbrush and two pairs of shirts, I imagine). The supplier in Poland was able to help her somewhat, telling her she didn’t have to receive all of these flowers at once as agreed. Now tulpis by thousands arrive in Tallinn week after week and the flowers that should have been given to women of Kyiv on March 8 by sons and sweethearts and husbands are here, some on my kitchen table. I go to the flower shop every now and then, buying tulips from her and also half-secretly looking at her as if she was a super woman. She isn’t. But by selling them here she keeps paying her employees back home who have nothing to sell. I’ve discovered one educational initiative called The School of Hope where qualified teachers who have fled to Estonia are giving Zoom classes to Ukrainian children here. They run it on a voluntary basis right now and I am regularly donating money so they can pay something to these teachers – my colleagues! They say there are more than 300 children already attending this school. I saw my auntie’s in-laws in church this past Saturday. They had just arrived, sat shyly in the pew when someone translated them my sermon. A granny with two grandchildren. The father and mother had to stay in Ukraine.

Just this morning in the news on the National Radio they said that the Estonian government is working hard on a plan for civilians in the case of war. We don’t have metro so there are no ready-made bomb shelters here. There are no sirens for air raids. There is no system as to where people need to evacuate when they have to leave their homes for good. The plans are in the making now, apparently.

It’s all a bit too much to take in. Not to mention the news with horrific pictures that should have forever remained in concentration camps in 1945. Last week I developed a chronic headache and some people referred me to a massage therapist. I went to see her yesterday and she said my neck and shoulders were very stiff. I try to distance myself emotionally from all the news that flood in every day but the body still reacts to it. The body aches. So I will probably have to go to massage again and again this spring, just in order to function normally and to have this one blissful hour far from Twitter and the evil that we are all staring in the eye.

But there are the other news and colors, too. Just today, scrolling through Twitter feed I happened to see several pictures of little liberated Ukrainian towns where people are on the streets en masse, cleaning. There are some cats who have been able to dig themselves out from the rubble, and they are being greeted with joy. Soldiers taking stray dogs with them because the dogs won’t leave. There are spontaneous „first aid“ centres where people who have next to nothing bring things to share with those who have even less left. And my mind wanders back to a marvelous book I read last spring. It’s Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Grossman is one of my all-time favourites, having been a war reporter during the WWII – an Ukrainian Jew, by the way – with marvelous talent and bravery. And after all the horrors of war that he saw, he still wrote his books, and he said this in Life and Fate: “I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

And these words ring true as I read them through tears. The small kernel of human kindness has not yet been destroyed.