One of my closest friends was Naji Asfar, who ran a shop dealing in ancient artifacts for museums around the world. We were young and single, spending our nights chasing music and the Scandinavian women who came on vacation for Beirut’s beautiful beaches and heat. It felt free. Carefree.
Then the war broke out.
I was staying at the Royal Garden Hotel in the Hamra district.
In the spring of 1974, as I stepped onto the hotel balcony, I could look down at firefights from behind sandbags in the street. Sometimes I’d find a spent shell casing lying by the railing.
The airport was shut. No TV. No phones. Even the post office was closed.
Every few days, there was a ceasefire. Everyone ran to restock. Then the shelling came back. The hotel would brace. You never knew what the next day would bring.
That’s when I learned what being a civilian in war really meant. It wasn’t just the bullets. It was the isolation.
"You feel the world getting smaller. The quiet is the worst part."
I wrote letters. I couldn’t send them, but just writing them felt like contact with the outside world. I got out when the airport reopened. But I never really left Beirut.
I remember how quickly normal life vanished in Beirut. In Ukraine, that disappearance has lasted years.
Kristina from Kharkiv remembers the first night of the war like a photograph burned into film. Her last normal act: finishing a story on flower shop scams for International Women’s Day. At 4:20 a.m., she finally went to bed. An hour later, she and her husband were awakened to the sound of rocket fire. “We are being bombed,” she said, still half-asleep. The flower story never ran.
Sophia was in physics class when the bombs landed near her school. She pressed herself against a wall, covered her ears, opened her mouth to avoid a shockwave concussion—techniques shared like folk wisdom now. That day was the last day anyone thought the war would be short.
"It wasn’t just the bombs. It was the sound of normal life stopping all at once."
Families fled. Sometimes on foot, sometimes with scooters, sometimes with nothing but documents and kids. Yulia ran at 5 a.m. and spent seven days at the border, rationing the last of their food and water. She had her first panic attack there. Others couldn’t flee. An old woman named Zinaida now lives with 200 people in a Lviv shelter. She has photos of where her home used to be. The house is gone. The memory isn’t.
"We lived without windows for two months. But we stayed. Because it was our home."
Her words echoed across the country, where others shared equally raw snapshots.
Under occupation, some were tortured. Some died in basements too crowded to breathe. One man etched names into the wall so the dead wouldn’t be forgotten. People lived in those rooms, with children in one corner, human waste in another, and bodies stacked in a third. Others stayed in bomb shelters for months, the ceiling dripping water, the walls sweating mold. “We wrote ‘people’ on the door, hoping that might spare us.”