Svetlana Dokudovskaya and Alexandra ‘Sanya’ Ilkhovskaia, both originally from Moscow, will talk about Svetlana’s book Operation Montparnasse, which describes how they helped Ukrainian refugees in a Paris railway station in the Spring of 2022.
When Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022 and vast numbers of Ukrainians, mainly women, children and the elderly began to leave their country in droves, hundreds of concerned people gathered at railway stations in cities across Europe to help them on their journey to escape the war. One of the ways the volunteers helped the most was by listening. This book is a collection of long and short stories they heard between March and May 2022 at Montparnasse station in Paris. The author, Svetlana Dokudovskaya, describes the many different Ukrainians she met as a volunteer, tells how the volunteers helped them in different stations around Paris, and tries to understand how the war has changed what it means to be Russian.
The stories about Ukrainians and volunteers, war and peace, dreams and losses are illustrated with drawings by Ukrainian children who gave them to volunteers and railway staff. You will see a slide show of some of the drawings during the talk.
About the speakers
Svetlana Dokudovskaya is a senior research scientist specialising in cancer and cell biology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). She graduated in Chemistry from Moscow State University and has been living in Paris for 17 years. In the book Svetlana explains how her encounter with Alexandra, ‘Sanya’, Ilkhovskaia played a crucial role in her decision to help in Montparnasse.
Alexandra Ilkhovskaia was born in Moscow and moved to Paris with her mother at the age of five at the beginning of the 1990s. After graduation from the Sorbonne University Alexandra, a mother of two girls, worked with passion as a primary school teacher for 10 years. Alexandra was at the point of founding her own school, when the war in Ukraine started. She then began volunteering and coordinating the reception of Ukrainian refugees at Montparnasse railway station in Paris. Her organizing abilities impressed the French railway agency (SNCF) so much that she was offered a permanent position at the SNCF “crisis management” centre, where she is currently working and continues to volunteer.