In 1941, during his confinement in the Auschwitz concentration camp, the writer Primo Levi recited from memory verses of the Divine Comedy to other prisoners to hold onto something the Nazis couldn’t take away from them: memory. Because sometimes, surviving starts with remembering.
Mariupol: the last goodbye. The story was told in a extensive BBC report. Oleksandr Ivanov left Mariupol in April 2022 convinced that that call to his wife would be the last. In the midst of the collapse of the Ukrainian defense, surrounded by corpses, unlit bunkers and the permanent smell of death, the marine officer ended captured and sent first to Olenivka and then to a penal colony in Mordovia.
There began a captivity 1,495 days. Almost four years without knowing if his country still existed, if his family was still alive or if the war was over. Time stopped being measured in days and began to be measured in silences.
Prison as a psychological weapon. They counted in the middle that what destroyed the prisoners most was not hunger, although Oleksandr lost thirty kilos, nor the cold, or the overcrowding of eight men in a tiny cell forced to spend most of the day standing. It was mental demolition.
The Russian guards repeated over and over again that Ukraine had disappearedThey burned letters in front of them and filled the air with constant propaganda on the radio. Talking was prohibited. Think, told in the reportwas almost the only thing left. And when you spend months thinking about your life, your family and a future that may never come, even your memory begins to run out.
The most unlikely weapon. It was at this point in history where the unthinkable appeared. Apparently, Oleksandr had been obsessed with Harry Potterto the point of having reread the saga so many times that he had almost completely memorized it. Thus, what was an obsessive hobby ended up becoming a survival tool.
First he confessed to his companions that I knew the story. Then he began to narrate it. Book by book. Chapter by chapter. Whispering so that the guards wouldn’t hear him. For five or six hours a day, in that Russian cell, a Ukrainian soldier turned seven fantasy novels into something much more important: a form of keep sanity alive.
Image of Oleksandr on his Instagram account
Hogwarts inside a cell. Of course, the scene stopped being entertainment very quickly. Oleksandr narrated it like a serial, always stopping at the most exciting point to create anticipation. His companions began to wait every morning just to find out how the story continued.
In an environment designed to collapse from the inside, the saga filled the void. The prisoners began to see themselves as Azkaban inmateswith the guards converted in dementors on the other side of the door. And that metaphor was not minor: in the logic of Harry Potter, dementors can only be fought with a Patronus. For them, that Patronus was the hope of returning home.
Humanizing the jailers. The BBC explained The irony was even stranger because Oleksandr had tattoos related to the Harry Potter universe since before the war. Some Russian guards recognized the symbols because they had seen the movies or read the books. And during certain moments, something unusual happened: they stopped seeing him as an enemy and spoke to him with a certain normality.
The war outside the cell. Meanwhile, his wife Nelly reconstructed his trail piece by piece from Ukraine. Each released prisoner memorized family telephone numbers and transmitted news upon release. That’s how he knew where he was, how he was and what he was doing.
Until one day he heard something incredible: that Oleksandr was counting harry potter in prison. Far from seeming absurd to him, it was a sign that he was still alive. If he could still tell stories, he thought, he was still whole. Even wrote to JK Rowling explaining how his books had become a refuge for prisoners of war. He never received a response.
After all this time. On May 15, Oleksandr was released in an exchange with 205 other Ukrainian soldiers. He came back broken physically, but intact in something essential. While he recovers, he devours news to fill four years of emptiness and receives packages from strangers with Harry Potter objects.
His wife, who got tattooed during the war the phrase “After all this time? Always”, the same one he wears on his skin, summarizes the story better than anyone. One where, in the end, what kept Oleksandr alive was not just military discipline or physical endurance. It was something much more unexpected and simple: the ability to remember a story and turn it into light when everything around looked black.
Image | Adam PolselliRyan McGrady, JoitsInstagram
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