The need for cultural advocacy during wartime

Nestled along the rue de Rollingergrund is the Ukrainian Library in Luxembourg, with hundreds of books, mainly in the Ukrainian language. Before our interview, Olga Aleksandrova walks through the shelves, pulling out selections – a culture book here, a young adult book there. There’s even a section with the Harry Potter series translated into Ukrainian.

Although Olga doesn’t run the library, she helped select some of the books in the collection after the library launched in 2022, with the help of LUkraine, RU Help and the Kyiv-based Library Krajna foundation. The commune of Luxembourg City provided the space.

Olga enjoys being surrounded by literature – and talking about it. A prolific writer herself, she has eight books to her name, four of which have been published and are short story collections. She’s currently working on her ninth, the working title of which is Endless Hope, which aims to share the stories of people, including children, and their journey to Luxembourg.

Olga is a refugee herself, having arrived in Luxembourg around three weeks after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. She thinks the stories in her latest book will be interesting for others. "We don’t have any hint that this is the last war in the world, " she says. "That’s why it’s nice to know how to react. At first, people are absolutely lost, bewildered… and it’s nice if you understand that people survived. People can live in very hard circumstances."

Like a flash

In my previous meetings with her, Olga has shared her experience of leaving Ukraine. Originally from Kyiv, Olga was a contributor to magazines in her home country when the 2022 invasion occurred. She recalls the night she experienced her first bombardment, how she felt at a loss as to what to do: she stepped into action by taping the windows, and the screeching of the tape woke up her three daughters.