Seeing those images from #Ukraine, a country I visited a few years ago, brings tears to my eyes. It is tortuous viewing and behind the news stories lies so much fear, misery, heartache, anger, pain and courage.
I feel it deeply, because I am immediately transported to #Beirut and #SouthLebanon after the 2006 #bombing. The sights and smells stay with me. Cars buried beneath great slabs of fallen concrete, children’s toys, photos, fragments of furniture peep out from the rubble. People wander about with blank stares – their emotions have been wrung out. They have started clearing up. Dust fills your nostrils.
People have died here horribly and brutally, families have been devastated – their world torn apart, their future bleak and uncertain.
It is a whole #community fractured. Life will never be the same again. Children with frightened eyes, cover their ears and crouch at any sound with raised decibels.
It is not a ‘Theatre of #War.’ It is hell. It is devastation on an unimaginable scale. It is wanton destruction of lives. When you have seen it, you can never turn back. My father never once spoke of World War Two. Not a single utterance. It had changed him forever.
My tears have not yet dried. I know this. I never ever want to see this again.
Ever, ever, never.
My heart breaks and at once I am transported back to Beirut.
