The Ukrainian girl who sang 'Let It Go' from a bomb shelter gave us all hope

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As best I can remember, I was 14 years old when I first felt a responsibility to care about someone other than the people in my orbit.

I was hovering in the kitchen doorway, my hands full of dinner dishes as I watched my father attempt to comfort Mom. She was standing in front of the sink with her hands over her face, weeping.

I can’t recall their exact conversation. I just remember that she kept talking about “all those children” and “all those poor mothers.” Dad told her this is war and there was nothing she could do about that. She should try to stop thinking about Vietnam.

Vietnam War to Ukraine War

That was impossible in towns like ours. My home county, full of working-class boys with no deferments, would lose 26 of them in the Vietnam War. So many others served, and many of them returned forever changed. These were our friends and neighbors. There was no ignoring that war.

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Later, I learned what had prompted my mother’s despair that night in the kitchen in the summer of 1972. She had seen AP photographer Nick Ut’s now iconic photo of Kim Phuc, the 9-year-old girl running naked and screaming in pain from burns after a napalm bomb attack in South Vietnam.

Kim Phuc was the same age as my little brother. The sight of that little girl’s frightened face, the anguish in my mother’s voice – these forced me to care about children who lived far away. In church that Sunday, I silently prayed for those children I had never met, for the first time in my young life. 

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I haven’t thought about that for a long time, but Vladimir Putin’s unconscionable war against innocent Ukrainian citizens, and our growing despondency as we bear witness, brought it back. Once again, my prayers are for fellow humans who live far away. I am too old now to believe this is enough. 

From COVID-19 to Russia

For more than two years, we have lived in fear that we or someone we love could die of COVID-19. Just as we dare to feel a reprieve, we are reminded that entire families are dying from war. As critics rightly point out, this has always been true. Now, because of brave journalists and citizen storytellers, we are bearing witness to the suffering in Ukraine from the increasingly discomforting comfort of our homes.

This tweet on Monday from MSNBC host Tiffany Cross sure got to me: “The guilt we can feel for laughing. For smiling. For taking a break from the imagery that’s cloaking our spirit in sadness. For having a moment of joy when there’s so much misery abound.” 

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This, always this. What does it say about me that, in the face of such atrocities, I can still make a joke? That after seeing images of dead children in the streets of Ukraine, I can hear a child’s happy voice at the post office and break into a smile?

It says that I am human, I want to believe. There’s a long, cobbled road between compassion and looking away, and that is where we explore our complexities. This is where we try to experience the rest of life, still. Without this, we are steadily depleted until we have nothing left to give. 

'A visit from children'

One of my favorite quotes is from novelist Alison Lurie, in her book, "The Last Resort": “As you grow older ... you have only two choices: you can live in the fading past, or, like children do, in the bright full present.”

Perhaps that is what we are trying to do every time we take a break from the hardest news, the darkest moments. Somewhere within us, the child calls. Somewhere deeper still, we recognize the wisdom of children.

“I had a visit so instructive,” Annie Dillard wrote in "The Writing Life," “that when it was over, and I had fully absorbed its lesson, I considered never opening my door again. This was a visit from children.”

In recent days, Marta Smekhova shared a video that quickly went viral of a little girl whose singing silenced everyone in a crowded bomb shelter in Kyiv. With braids in her hair and stars on her sweater, young Amelia sang the song “Let It Go” from Disney’s “Frozen.” She sang in Ukrainian, but millions of parents and grandparents recognized the song immediately. We know these lyrics:

My power flurries through the air into the ground

My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around

And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast

I'm never going back, the past is in the past

That little girl, she is loved. Everyone in that shelter, every person fighting for Ukraine, every family ripped apart by this war – they grieve because they love. This is the language we all speak.

We love, and so we grieve for the people of Ukraine. We love, and so we cling to signs of hope, still.

Connie Schultz is a columnist for Paste BN. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, "The Daughters of Erietown," is a New York Times bestseller. Reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz