Air raid sirens are now the soundtrack to their lives.
 | By Max Strasser Assistant Editor, Opinion |
Specific sounds can have a tremendous emotional power. Talk to New Yorkers about what life was like during the first wave of the coronavirus in the spring of 2020, and they will probably start telling you about the wailing of ambulances in an otherwise hushed city. Those sounds of sirens represented so much. |
That was the first thing I thought of when Gus Wezerek and Sara Chodosh, my colleagues on Times Opinion's graphics team, told me that they had found data about the frequency of air raid sirens in Ukraine since Russia's invasion began in February. They used the information to calculate how many air raid sirens there were in each city, how often they went off, how many collective hours Ukrainians had spent listening to their monotonous howl. |
Sara, Gus and I knew that the numbers could tell an important story about life during wartime, but that they couldn't capture the feeling of going through your day to that woeful soundtrack. For that, we'd need to hear from someone on the ground. |
I asked the Ukrainian novelist Lyubko Deresh, who lives in Kyiv, to write about the sirens, to tell the rest of us around the world about how a sound coming from a few blocks away can upend your day, send you hiding in terror, remind you that your country is under attack. |
In his guest essay today — accompanied by Sara and Gus's graphics — he describes how, two months into the war, "he always unexpected, piercing sound of the sirens amid seemingly peaceful life in the capital has become the irrational symbol of this new way of being, which we must react to not only to preserve our lives but also to understand and examine." |
Deresh's essay is at turns harrowing and hopeful. But what it does best is gives readers a sense of what Ukrainians are experiencing, even those far from the front lines of the fighting. |
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