The war lexicon is also active in peacetime. Without noticing, we speak or write using words like front, battle, army. We refer to something else, but the terms are the same as in the reports from Ukraine. The short circuit becomes more evident if I say, with a conventional expression widely used in the media during the pandemic, that a hospital is a trench. It is said both from the perspective of those who care and that of those who are cared for. And we often equate the course of a disease with a war. But it is a questionable metaphor.
In front of this photograph that comes from the Ohmatdyt hospital in Kiev, I think that the metaphors sometimes pulverize into reality. And I think of it in front of another photo, which is difficult to look at and comes from the hospital in Dnipro and portrays an injured child who survived the missile attack on the Kramatorsk station on April 8th. The trench and the hospital do not enter into a symbolic relationship, but overlap, until they coincide. The young woman who tries to distract the hospitalized child does so in the most difficult of conditions: the one in which the “outside” still does not allow hope. Then she must, with that slight gesture, with that raising her arms, suppose that reality is not just what you see – inside the hospital and outside the hospital. He has to trust the invisible, and it is something that is only learned from children.