Ein Brief aus Kharkov

Siegfried Hornecker leitete einen Brief des ukrainischen Problemschachkomponisten Vladislav Tarasiuk weiter. Der Brief wurde zunächst in einem Problemschachforum veröffentlicht, dort aber schnell gelöscht.

Today is March 15, 2022. I am alive. My family, thank God, is also alive…

I continue to work in the hospital near Kharkov. I help the wounded…

Yesterday morning, a woman was admitted to us with shrapnel wounds to the head. She was dead by morning… By evening, a man was brought in with torn fingers and a broken hand. They amputated his hand… They were civilians from my town. So was the girl, Jana, 5 years old, who was admitted on Sunday with a concussion. The house she lived in was hit by an air bomb – her mother and grandmother were killed. Jana was left alive but an orphan…

I have no emotions left at all. I’m scared for my two children, for my mother, who has lost her memory. All of them are looked after now by my wife Alla… They are near in a multi-storey building, 300 meters from my hospital, where I work. During shelling or air strikes they can’t go down to the basement. My mother does not walk well and my younger daughter Zhenya cries a lot… This is a great misfortune not only for my family, but for all Ukrainians.

We lived on our land, we did not take someone else’s. Why should we be killed now and have our homes destroyed? It’s a pity that there is still not a single chess composer from Russia here on this forum who would condemn the criminal actions of Putin and the subhumans from the Russian army, the genocide against the Ukrainian people… Why are you silent, do you approve of this war? Do you all think that your army is „liberating“ Ukraine from Nazism, that there are no civilian casualties, no destruction…? In Kharkov alone about 600 residential buildings have been destroyed. This is true, although not everyone can believe it. And how much more such misfortune there is in other cities of Ukraine… In the surviving houses there is no light, no gas, no heating. My friend and etudist Vladimir Samilo from Kharkov lives in such conditions. It is very hard for him…

Our Igor Yarmonov from Mariupol has not been in touch for a week. I really hope he is alive…

My post is addressed to my chess art colleagues, so I beg the Administrator not to delete it.

Regards, Vladislav.