Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse.

It’s been a bleak few days as we finally saw what life looks like for Ukrainians under Russian occupation. So far, we’ve seen what Putin’s army did while they occupied the area around Kyiv. We know less about what’s happening in cities like Mariupol and in towns around the Donbas that the Russian army still holds. We do know, however, that they are resorting to ruling by terror. The mayor of Kherson, which was captured early in the war, told a Ukrainian newspaper that around 100 people—mainly journalists, activists, and former military personnel—have been kidnapped. As you’ll see from this piece and my last dispatch, the situation isn’t going to improve any time soon.

But because TWBW is not about pessimism or wallowing, I want to ask you, again, to support a cause I really believe in. My friend Alina Polyakova, a Soviet Jewish refugee who was born in Kyiv, now heads a think tank in Washington, D.C. called the Center for European Policy Analysis, or CEPA. (CEPA is a non-profit organization. You can learn more about them here.)

When Russia invaded and we were all stunned and stupefied, Alina sprang into action. She decided to use the infrastructure at her disposal to help Ukrainian scholars, journalists, and activists who had been displaced and scattered by the war. I have been helping her fundraise to bring 20 such people to the U.S. to write, research, and, perhaps, take a breath and figure out what’s next. We’re trying to get the funds to get these people work visas to the U.S., as well as salaries, benefits and the space to think amid the din of war. If you think this is as good a cause as I do, please donate here.

When I saw photos of the heads and hands and feet of town elder Olha Sukhenko and her family protruding from the sandy grave in which they were hastily buried, when I saw journalists crowded around her shoddy burial among the pines outside of Motyzhyn, I thought immediately of the Ukrainian forests where dozens of my relatives were shot and dumped in mass graves in 1941: in Zhytomyr, in Medzhybizh, in Salnitsa, Ostropol, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. I thought, this is what it must have looked like then, when, returning in 1944, their relatives found a million Ukrainian Jews, buried in the loam. It was these massacres that began to break the Nazi soldiers carrying them out, forcing the invention of a more efficient and less intimate way of eradicating a people: the death camps, like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek.

Citing the famous quote attributed to the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, my friend Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist and author, wrote, “If one can’t write poetry after Auschwitz, then what can one say after Bucha?”

In both cases, it turns out, one can say a lot while saying not much at all.