‘Diaries of War’ Traces Two Personal Accounts — One From Ukraine, One From Russia

When it comes to critical events happening around the globe, sometimes individuals turn to the past — the sequence of occasions and forces that led to a particular moment — in an attempt to understand. And sometimes they aim to look closely and directly at what is unfolding as it occurs.

Both of these kinds of careful efforts — the intensive quest for truth by looking to the past, or by attending to the present — are urgently needed in times of crisis.

Self-described visual journalist Nora Krug undertakes the latter, helping her readers look more closely and deliberately into day-to-day experiences of war, with Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts from Ukraine and Russia. In the book, Krug, who is German-born and now lives and works in the United States, follows the day-to-day lives of two people in the year after Russia’s 2022 renewed attacks against Ukraine, a full-scale invasion that continues to this day.

These war diaries, as Krug terms them, are in fact culled from text exchanges and interviews between the author and illustrator and two real people whose full names have been withheld. They stretch across a whole year, with Krug’s drawings accompanying words taken from each of her subjects, and her own brief introductory remarks opening the book.

First there is K., a journalist based in Kyiv. Born in western Russia when it was still part of the Soviet Union, K. moved to Crimea, Ukraine as a young teen. Now she is a journalist often reporting from the frontlines, and raising two young children, ages two and six, with her husband when the book’s coverage begins. Early into the diaries, K. and her husband send their children to Denmark to live with her mother. She is the only one of the pair who is able to visit them, as men in Ukraine between ages of 18 and 60 are restricted in leaving the country so that they can be available to fight the war. K. shuttles back and forth regularly between her family members, reporting, “My sons have become children of war. Their generation is broken.”

In Krug’s previous book, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, she grappled with her own family history, including her grandfather’s involvement in the Nazi regime as what was termed a “follower” during denazification. In addition to telling their stories through traces of whatever documents she could find, in Belonging Krug also brought in her own perspective as well as the conversations she had with other family members while finding her way to the reality of what had taken place before her time. “Facts are important and incontestable,” Krug writes here in her introduction. “But personal narratives shed light on different aspects of the truth and are therefore important components of it.”

As in Belonging, with Diaries of War Krug incorporates her careful research and observation skills alongside attentive and thoughtful design and illustration to tell a multilayered story of the many emotional and psychic ravages of war. K. describes many moments of hopelessness, and her frequent sense of a lost future. Nonetheless, through it all, her thirst for life endures.

“I don’t ask myself what I’d be willing to die for,” she writes at one point soon after hearing of her friends who have been captured by Russians. “I simply plan not to die. My goal is to survive, to help other people survive this war and to preserve the Ukranian heritage.”