Sofia has seen death up close. She has suffered it. The 11-year-old girl leaves the bunker where she took refuge after the first bombing when her small planet was invaded and runs through the desolation caused by the attack. “There was smoke and a whirlwind of dust coming out of the destroyed houses, it seemed as if the sky had collapsed and the clouds had fallen on the planet.” Sofia searches for her grandmaher loving grandmother who smells of chocolate. She is anxious. She runs, screams, asks. Very soon she learns that a “metal bird” vomited bombs on the hospital where the old woman helped wounded children. Sofia’s Babu fell among the victims of the attack. The girl understands in this brutal way that her small world is sinking into the terror of war. This is the portrait that the Mexican writer and journalist Lydia Cacho makes of the conflict that bleeds Ukraine after the invasion ordered by Vladimir Putin. Cacho publishes The day they invaded my planet (Alfaguara), a moving children’s story that tells of the horrors suffered by Ukrainian children, but which is also an argument about the magic of innocence and their longing for peace. “In the midst of war, people laugh because they suddenly discover that they are alive,” the narrator writes with anguish.
Sofia’s story is inspired by the lives and sufferings of millions of children in Ukraine, trapped in the hell of watching their relatives die in the massacres of war. Cacho has listened to the voices of these children to narrate the conflict from that innocence interrupted “by missiles, death and forced displacement.” Sofia’s fairy tale story recalls that of another real-life Sofia, six years old, who died on August 19, 2023 due to the impact of a Russian missile on the Taras Shevchenko theater, located in Chernihiv, one of the first regions to be attacked by Moscow. Sofia is one of the almost 2,000 children killed in the war, but whose voices Cacho does not want to be silenced. The journalist has thus created the magical world of the fantasy Sofia, who lives in Ukraine, her small and beautiful planet of golden wheat and very rich metals, whose inhabitants are always waiting for the ambitions of the great planet Moscovic, of which they were once slaves.
One night, Sofia is playing in her room with her dog Cora—who has the superpower to detect serious dangers and turn invisible “to obtain secret information”—and her cousin Andrei, when the earth begins to shake. The children, who in their playful imagination imagined they were climbing a great mountain, then throw themselves on the floor without understanding what is happening. Cora turns invisible and leaves the room to see what is happening out there. The little dog, upon her return, projects in her eyes the horror she saw: “Giant horses with metal legs and silver hooves with sharp beaks” that made the earth tremble in their wake, spit fire and knocked down houses. “Silver birds with spider legs and giant eyes” that shot from the air. The armed green storm clouds that advanced furiously. Metal caterpillars with a thousand wheels that spread terror. “They look like dragons,” said Andrei, frightened. “Is this real?” What the children see in the dog’s eyes reminds them of a violent video game, but when they leave the room they discover that it is real. Babu looks for them and together they run to the subway, which has been converted into a security bunker. “There is no time to lose,” says the grandmother. “They have invaded our planet.” In the bunker they discover other people. They are desolate, sad and afraid. They cry. “The world has turned black and white,” thinks Sofia. “I discovered grey people, with clothes full of dust and red stains.” Blood tarnishes everything. Only the laughter of a baby brings back her joy. “Children’s laughter makes people forget about fear,” she says.
Lydia Cacho writes the chronicle of horror. The reader can understand what a child feels when his world of magic and innocence is violated by bullets from those “Green Clouds”, Putin’s mercenaries, hired assassins paid by the Kremlin. Putin is the ogre of the story, renamed Brutus the Planet-Snatcher. Cacho achieves the balance of talking about war with children “without infecting them with terror and despair”, writes journalist Emma Graham-Harrison, war correspondent in Ukraine for British newspapers. The Guardian y The Observer. Graham-Harrison says the story “celebrates the courage and hope that illuminates the darkest places of the human experience.” Sofia discovers that courage through her grandma, The author leaves the girl and her first child in the shelter to go out to help other wounded people in the local hospital, where she dies because of the bombs of the Brutus that portrays Putin. The girl loses her innocence, yes, but it is also the metaphor that the author uses to talk about the beauty of the illusion of childhood in the midst of horror. “It is a reading that allows us to approach from an innocent and hopeful perspective the situation that thousands of children live around the world and see how, between losses and fears, they preserve the illusion of giving meaning to life,” wrote Karla Ibera Sánchez, investigative journalist in a commentary on the story.
Cacho traveled to Ukraine in mid-October 2022. Eight months had passed since the Russian invasion and the journalist wanted to understand the conflict in order to tell it to Latin American audiences. She was traveling with a clear objective: to report on the suffering of children and women. “I was interested in listening to the voices of girls and boys, understanding how they live and how they narrate the war from an innocence interrupted by missiles, death and forced displacement,” the author explained in the epilogue of the work, which was released in bookstores this July. On that occasion, the writer met an old friend, the writer Victoria Amelina, who introduced her to sources who helped her on her trip and would later die under a Russian attack. Cacho returned to Ukraine for the second time and visited the northern regions of the country, including kyiv, the capital. She visited a subway station converted into a bunker, where she says she felt dismayed when she saw the refugee children. “There was nothing but dignity and strength in their words, they understood injustice and did not keep quiet about anything,” she says. It was then that the writer felt the need to tell what she had heard in a different way and that is how her children’s story about the war came about, the story of Sofia, Cora, Andrei and Babu. The book is illustrated with beautiful images by Estelí Meza.
The story is also a plea for peace. Sofia and her cousin write a letter to “the leaders of all the planets” to “demand that adults no longer manufacture weapons, that war is unjust and that we do not want them to play with our lives anymore.” It is a moving text, in which the young authors remember “that children know that no one wants tyrants” and that violence can only generate more hatred. In a brutal line they affirm that “we have seen that, when their soldiers kill innocent people, some children develop a desire in their hearts to take revenge on those who killed their families when they are older.”
The letter, which also appears in Ukrainian in the book, is the voice of thousands of children from that war-torn country, who ask to “live in a world without fear, where no one kills us, destroys our homes or kills our grandmothers.” Cacho’s is not a horror story. These are innocent voices that other children outside of that conflict can understand and the author asks adults to listen to them so as not to steal their innocence anymore, thrown brutally into the world of adult violence, as shown in a conversation between Sofia and her grandmother. Babu tells the girl at one point during the invasion: “Obey, Sofia. We are at war, and when there is war, girls must behave like adults.” Sofia answers with a laconic yes, but she is lying. Her answer sums up the deep message of the story: “I am a girl and I am not ready to be an adult.”
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