An International Watershed Moment
BY DON DOUCETTE
Dnieper River Watershed
Several weeks ago, I engaged in a casual conversation with a fellow patron during afternoon teatime. The taking of tea and the culturally related conversation and valued exchange of ideas at these times can prove profound and timely.
My friend recommended a book. He is Jewish and we were frankly discussing matters related to the Holocaust.
The book is titled, EAST WEST STREET, by Philippe Sands.
I began reading several weeks ago and little did I know that the subject of my reading would be so closely related to current humanitarian turn of events – mainly, the present Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The primary individuals within the text, and including the author, all had/have connections to the Galician Region of western Ukraine. Two of these men tracked similarly and did not know one another but studied at the same university under the tutelage of the same professors in close proximity to the “the little Paris of Ukraine,” the City of Lviv.
Both men were later involved with prosecuting Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials following the conclusion of World War Two. One introduced the word “genocide” and the other, the term, “crimes against humanity” – two descriptions so commonly used today when dealing with matters related to the darker side of history and international law.
I had known little of Ukraine and my limited reading prepared and enlightened me about the region – and with this week’s current events, linked with the present hostilities and associated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine playing 24/7 in our living rooms, I feel much better informed.
Present events seem so closely similar to the brutal World War Two, Nazi eastward expansion into Russia and caught up in this destructive frenzy, the millions of innocent victims so brutally abused.
And so, today as I speak, moving shadows of death and destruction are so presently evident throughout Ukraine.
And my geographic crash course about a primary Ukrainian watershed – a large river and associated watershed occupies the heart of Ukraine known as the Dnieper River Watershed; the Dnieper River is one of the major rivers of Europe and ironically, its source said to be a bog slightly west of Moscow as it flows through the vastness of western Russia, Belarus and Ukraine to the Black Sea near the seaport of Odessa.
The famous Danube River also flows to the Black Sea.
Most troubling, indeed, that the Dnieper River Watershed through time has been a silent ever-present witness to periodic brutal episodes of war, “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”