Voices Between Silence

Voices Between Silence brings together four testimonies of Ukrainian civilians whose lives were turned upside down by the war between Russia and Ukraine. These testimonies are not official reports or journalistic accounts, they are raw personal accounts reflecting how ordinary people survive through intense fear, uncertainty, and grief. It explores how war shapes memory, silences voices, and makes telling a story urgent yet so difficult.

Some testimonies are quite vivid and detailed, while others remain spare, uttering a few halting words that only serve to hint at an inner crater of emotional collapse. Each story offers a window into how trauma changes the way we speak, remember, and endure. From a teenager discussing the destruction of the environment to a woman trapped in occupied territory with no power or water, these voices show that war clobbers life quietly through civilian and social disruption, even more than through physical violence.

One of the key questions asked by this exhibit is: What does it mean to testify while still inside a war? From testimonies given in occupied areas, such as Donetsk and Kharkiv, we learn that even uttering a single sentence on an online forum may be a source of danger. Here, the very act of speaking, even if briefly, becomes resistance. Others, like that of the 18-year-old who narrates grief and unity after the Kakhovka dam's destruction, show how testimony becomes a space for collective mourning and moral reflection.

The testimonies you will see down below were written by some person at war. These are their own, original words, unedited, translated, and shared with permission. Their experiences differ, but it is the desire to be heard that binds them. In a war that tries to erase them, these voices insist on being seen.

Testimony 1608

The emotional shock created by the July 17 abomination of an act maxed out in the agitated mind of an 18-year-old in Poltava. The words redden with the agony of a nation watching environmental destruction. He has not been displaced but reflects with empathy and anger on the suffering of others. The metaphor "we are butterflies who live one day" draws upon the emotional fragility of life during war. The given testimony is a moral witness against silence, making the pain louder, reminding us that even in war, writing is an act of dignity.

Testimony 1575

An account of the first days of the war, one grippingly told by a 19-year-old from Dnipropetrovsk: waking with his younger brother's cry, seeing his mother cry, waiting in panic at a supermarket, and hearing rockets overhead on the river. He remembers and recalls moments of terror, absence, and confusion with stark clarity and sadness. The family forms the emotional nucleus of his story: his younger brother's fear, his mother's sorrow, and his father's absence in territorial defense. The testimony, by means of memory and reflection, depicts time being fractured by war, along with its routine and childhood - yet it instills hope through survival belief.

Testimony 1600

This powerful testimony gives voice to the slow collapse of daily life under Russian occupation. There was no water, no electricity, no work, no peace-just fear, frustration, and the crushing weight of emotional exhaustion. Her days ran with longing for her daughter, tension with her husband, and distance from her friends. Gardening or making a simple call-would become an impossibility. Yet by giving her testimony under adverse conditions of poor Internet and constant danger, she places herself in time and space-the voice emerging from the shadows of occupation, faintly, defiantly, and full of hope.

Testimony 1545

The testimony of that woman remains short yet severe. She is 31 years old and from occupied Kharkiv. A mere single sentence coming from her, but each word is weighted with meaning: fear, anxiety, mobilization, uncertainty, and unemployment. Then the conclusion: She changed her priorities. It is as if there is a quiet collapse of speech, applying Emile Durkheim to research, one could say it flushes down emotion and shatters identity. Her silence is louder than words. In the distances between her lines, one can feel the weight of survival. The testimony is a reminder that trauma does not always have to produce big narratives, sometimes it is just a short sentence and the courage to utter that sentence.