Art Against War

War has never been pretty. It leaves vast tracts of devastation behind. Art is a great medium that graphically and relentlessly details all the brutalities, all the gruesome horrors that we bury inside so we can move on. But we need to confront them every once in a while.

Art Against War; Credits: http://siebo.hsieber.net/media/img/nowar.jpg

Here’s an amazing video I invite every one to see. It shows sand animation by Kseniya Simonova, a twenty-four year old girl from Ukraine who won the Ukraine’s Got Talent award for 2009. The story she so beautifully weaves has everybody in tears, including the judges. The big screen captures the eight-minute magic that Kseniya creates on a glass table with her swiftly moving fingers on the sand, constructing an animation that portrayed life during Ukraine’s Great Patriotic War against the Germans in World War II.

A little history. On September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland. The Nazis considered Ukrainians, like the Jews, as sub-humans. On June 22, 1941 Hitler invaded Ukraine. At first the Ukrainians treated the Nazis as liberators from Russian Communist rule. However, Germans under Hitler were far more repressive. Ukrainians thus suffered under both Stalin as well as Hitler. About 10 million people lost their lives in the genocide. (http://www.infoukes.com/history/ww2/)

The story begins with depicting Ukraine prior to the war with a couple sitting peacefully on a bench. Then we see the public announcement calling people to arms. The peaceful scene is shattered by Luftwaffe planes. The woman, with her baby in the crib, burns a candle and prays for her fiance/husband who has gone to war. More bombs fall, and the woman gets the envelope that says her husband has died. She ages fast, mourns his death and visits the monument of those lost in war. She looks out the window with her son and sees her husband’s ghost and she tells herself “you are always near”.