From: Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (Day 797):
For the Lord, the Most High, is to be feared,
a great king over all the earth.
Psalm 47:2
As you may have noticed, I often write about the effect this war has on children. It breaks my heart to know that their careless childhood has to be marred by cruelty and suffering. However, there is another group I feel as passionate about – it is the elderly. Those whose childhood was ruined by WWII now need to relive the terrors of war in their old age.
You may have already seen this picture. Lidia is 98 years old. She lived in Ocheretyne, a village in the Donetsk region. A couple of days ago, Lidia and her son and daughter-in-law left their home in the occupied part of the village to get to the territory under Ukraine’s control. At some point, they separated, so Lidia walked more than 10 kilometers (6 miles) by herself, using a cane and stick for support, falling from exhaustion, and resting on the grass. She walked the entire day without food and water under Russian shelling. She walked until she saw Ukrainian soldiers who took her to a safe place.
Lidia said she had lost everything; almost the whole village had burned down, and even the trees had been uprooted from all the shelling. Having lived through WWII, 98-year-old Lidia hopes to live to see Ukraine’s victory.
I’ve been weeping, looking at Lidia’s picture and reading her story. Our Lord is a merciful God, but He will avenge the suffering of this dear woman.
The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation. (Exodus 34:6-7)
Voice of Ukraine 
One response to “5/1/2024 – Those whose childhood was ruined by WWII now need to relive the terrors of war in their old age…”
30 April 1944
J.R.R.Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher
“
30 April 1944
My dearest:
I have decided to send you another air letter, not an airgraph, in the hope that I may so cheer you up a little more… I do miss you so, and I do find all this mighty hard to bear on my own account and on yours. The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets), and always will be (despite the propagandists)—not of course that it has not is and will be necessary to face it in an evil world.
But so short is human memory and so evanescent are its generations that in only about 30 years there will be few or no people with that direct experience which alone goes really to the heart. The burnt hand teaches most about fire.
I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days—quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil—historically considered. But the historical version is, of course, not the only one.
All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ’causes’ and ‘effects’. No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitaris [(in light of the eternal)]. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives…”
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