How does war change you? Most of us are fortunate to experience the sorrows and tragedies of war solely through newspapers, television screens, and history books. While we may be able to empathise with the people who have experienced and are experiencing war, there’s a simultaneous detachment from the true horrors of this most barbaric and debased of human acts. Masha is a friend. She’s an actress, chef, and host of numerous supper clubs in Japan. However, Masha is also someone who’s experienced first-hand what it means when war is no longer something you observe from afar, but a reality that tears the walls of your life apart. Speaking to her was a lesson not only on living with grief and guilt, but the true strength of an individual who has had no other choice but to build a life outside of the country she calls home.
Masha’s from Kherson, a port city in the south of Ukraine. She grew up in a small town outside of the city, characterised by the simple, rural surroundings of the kind you’d find in a lot of lesser-known countryside regions in Europe. Though Masha called Kherson home, she also spent a lot of her youth in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. This was largely due to her father, who worked as a United Nations officer and was based in Kosovo. When she spoke about her childhood, she said that in hindsight, it was great. She traveled a lot and whenever she returned to Kherson, she always felt like that jet-setting and cultured cool girl, always with some story or tidbit to share about her adventures. Having said that, as a child, reality told a different story. Her parents worked a lot which meant Masha was often left to her own devices, and given that she was a single-child until she turned twelve, loneliness seemed to follow her wherever she went.
Throughout those adolescent years, one of Masha’s biggest companions was the arts. She attended a school that split its curriculum between standard subjects and the arts. Theatre was her first love which she started as early as five. On this, she recalled a funny memory. Masha’s mum clocked onto her daughter’s innate acting abilities given that Masha would occasionally lie about different things. Her lies and behaviour were so convincing that her mum rarely got angry once she found out the truth afterwards—instead, she praised her daughter for how talented an actress she was and these compliments always stayed with her. As she got older, her parents wanted her to study ballet and more traditional dance, but Masha never felt an innate interest in those forms of expression. Instead, painting eventually became more of an obsession, and after she moved to England for boarding school, it was painting—along with a burgeoning love of photography—that would be her main focus in art.
Masha’s parents sent her to the UK for better educational opportunities. Fourteen at the time, Masha welcomed the opportunity and so taking exams for different schools, passed three and decided on the Royal Hospital School in Suffolk. As a teenager living apart from her parents, the freedom of being on her own and the novelty of English life meant Masha’s days were tinged with a youthful exuberance. Still, there were tough times too. Masha—whether as a result of her somewhat alienated upbringing or constant travels as a child—always felt she had difficulty making friends. Being of a different nationality exacerbated this sense of separation, and even when she’d return to Kherson for holidays, she felt as if she no longer belonged there either. After two years in England, Masha says teary long-distanced phone calls with her parents became routine and homesickness became unbearable. Throughout this, even painting stopped providing the solace she needed. Adrift without her creative spark, she continued her studies in art history, sculpting, and painting without any real passion.
During her time at the Royal Hospital School, two events stand out. First, there was a boy. An English-Japanese boy named Tom, Masha shared a few classes with him and one afternoon, found herself in detention with him. They were the only two in the room, and Masha made her move by sitting on the chair next to his. So began their teenage romance. As many teenage romances are, their love was immediate, turbulent, and at times confusing, and yet the powerful bond they shared was undeniable. Tom would join Masha on her returns to Kherson. There, he met her family, learned about her culture, and fell in love with her home, an experience that while seemingly as insignificant as the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, would end up possessing a magnitude far beyond what either of them could’ve understood at the time. While the two would break up before graduation, their destinies would be forever intertwined.
The second event occurred at the start of sixth form—the two year period before university in the UK’s education system. Realising that she needed to figure out what she was going to do after she graduated, Masha took stock of her options. The fact was, she didn’t see a future in painting, art history, or sculpting. One day, she took a film studies class. While Masha had always loved films, she’d never acted before. Even when she studied theatre as a child she’d only ever been on stage as a singer or dancer. Getting into the film studies course, an idea came to light. Why not try acting? Even more fateful was when one day, she picked up a British monthly film magazine called Empire. Flipping through the pages, she came across an advert for the New York Film Academy (NYFA). A film and acting school based in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, the ad included details about an upcoming audition in London for prospective NYFA students. Masha took her chance, auditioned with a monologue from the movie “Dear John”, and landed a scholarship.
Growing up in post-Soviet Union Ukraine, Masha had grown up believing America was the land of freedom and opportunity. Attending NYFA’s Los Angeles school, another face to this utopian ideal of the country emerged given that she was within the proximity of Hollywood’s glitz and glamour. Similar to that excitement and freshness she felt when she first moved to England, Masha couldn’t shake the buzz from being so close to the moviemaking industry that for so long had served as a source of adoration, aspiration, and inspiration. She turned eighteen in LA, had a romantic sense of herself as a girl trying to etch out her name in the big wide world. Masha spoke of a few beautiful memories. For one, she enjoyed the classes at NYFA which were predominantly focused on on-screen acting, as well as a few theatre lessons. She also recalled her love of the old-school movie theatres she found dotted around LA—those vintage, nostalgic halls that with their time-worn look resembled portals back to the golden eras of American filmmaking. Besides that, she remembered the incredible Mexican food, farmer’s markets abounding with fresh produce, long hikes that ended at the most stunning views. Of course, there were downsides of living in LA too.
Though she admitted she was an impressionable eighteen year old, the rose-tinted glasses eventually came off and Masha perceived life in LA under a different light. While the house parties and celebrity encounters were exciting at first, eventually the emptiness and vapidity of it all got to be too much. For starters, some of the celebrities she met were far from pleasant, and the worst of the lot usually preyed on younger girls, offering attention only when they wanted something in return. As for the art itself, once she graduated from NYFA, Masha quickly learned what it actually meant to try to make it as an actress in LA.
Everyone’s heard the stories. Waiting tables to pay rent, dodging predatory producers, and forever waiting for the next audition. While there’s truth to each of these scenarios, Masha gave insight into a more modern issue that plagues the filmmaking industry. It was around 2019, and as she put it, social media stars dominated mainstream media and casting decisions increasingly hinged on follower counts. She recalled casting calls where one of the first questions she was asked was about hers, and given that she was never particularly active online, revealing the number felt akin to shooting herself in the foot. With this, Masha’s disillusionment with acting and LA as a whole spiralled. She’d spent years dedicating herself to her craft at NYFA, and now all that seemed to matter was whether she posted enough selfies on Instagram. While she made it a point not to bash actors who swam with the flow of the current, she didn’t have it in her to do the same. Stardom never interested Masha. She always loved the art of acting because it was a medium that allowed her to share who she was and what she had to say.
Following the realisation that acting wasn’t what she’d envisioned, Masha fell into a depression. Losing faith in herself and her prospects as an actress, she retreated inward, isolating herself from others as she stayed at home for weeks. Teary phone calls to her parents became the norm, just like when she was a teenager back in school. At this point, the only light at the end of the tunnel was to get out. Ultimately, Masha knew she needed to leave America and return home to her family in Ukraine.
Masha went back to Kherson. She spent a few months there, during which she felt herself rejuvenated from the love and support her family provided her. Eventually she got word that her childhood best friend was returning to Ukraine as well, and after the two got in contact, they decided to rent an apartment together in the capital, Kyiv. They had hopes of breaking into the Ukrainian filmmaking industry but as Masha put it, it was more of an independent scene and difficult to break into. Still, they kept on and for the most part, life seemed to be getting better. However, once Covid hit, Ukraine shut down. According to Masha, the country went on something of a permanent lockdown, with many people banned from leaving their houses and misinformation rampant on the news. Despite that, she admitted there was something nice about being with her best friend in Kyiv during this period, as if it was just the two of them reconnecting in their own private bubble while the world seemed to go mad outside. At some point, Masha’s savings started running out. Though nothing like her dreams of making it as an actress, she found work in customer support for an IT company that had created a cryptocurrency app. I laughed when she told me—a reaction she understood—given it was a stretch from the type of person she appeared from the outside. Still, she said she leveraged her acting experience given that part of the role involved making calls and selling the app. Besides that, she got paid in dollars which put an end to her financial worries.
A couple years passed in this manner. By all counts, Masha was happy. She’d left her old customer support job and found work at a company making Facebook and Instagram ads, and while the role might not’ve satisfied her as much as being on stage did, the job paid well and she got to live a good life. She’d moved in with her boyfriend, they owned a cat, and they travelled whenever they got the chance. Despite the peaceful joy that arose out of this simple, prosaic existence, Masha, along with many Ukrainians, couldn’t shake the undeniable dread that felt like it might spring out from around the corner at any moment. In late February of 2022, years of tension with Russia reached a boiling point. The anxiety was palpable in the air, and Masha and her boyfriend, out of precaution, filled up their car’s gas tank and went to the grocery store to stock up on food. She recalls one conversation vividly. Driving back to their apartment, Masha expressed how nervous she was. Her boyfriend, perhaps trying to soothe her, said, “It’s okay, even if the war starts, it’s not like bombs are going to start falling out of the sky.”
On February 24th, 2022, Masha woke up at four in the morning. She wasn’t sure why. She rarely woke up that early but something had drawn her from sleep. That undeniable dread. Getting out of bed, she paced the room, then feeling as if she needed to do something, went to feed her cat. Quiet. She paused. Raised her hand to her head and ran it through her hair. With a deep breath, she headed back to bed and tried to fall asleep. She heard a distant thump. Getting up, she looked out at her dark bedroom as if expecting to find some answer. Another thump, this time from her heart beating against her chest. At once, notifications started pinging her phone. News of what had happened—the answers Masha was looking for. The Russians had invaded Ukraine and her hometown of Kherson had been their entrypoint. They’d bombed the local airport and were now entering the city that she’d been born, grown up in, and called home. With that, time lost all sense of meaning. Masha spoke about how every minute stretched out into eternity and yet she was simultaneously hyper-focused in the moment. The thumps grew louder and eventually the windows to Masha’s apartment rattled with every explosion. She picked up her phone to call her mum. She hesitated, knew they were in Kherson and wasn’t sure if she was ready for what could be a dead line. She called anyway, her mum picked up and Masha remembered how nonchalant she tried to sound, though she could make out a quiver in her voice—perhaps this was her way of acting, her way of lying just like Masha had done as a child. Her mum told her Russian navigation was flying over Kherson, that soldiers were entering the city and that they couldn’t leave because some locals who were trying to flee from the left bank of Kherson had been shot.
Snapping back to reality in Kyiv, Masha scrambled for what to do. The missile siren went off for the first time in the capital, and though she heard a similar alarm back when she was a child witnessing the civil war in Kosovo, she was too young then to put any significance behind the ring. Her boyfriend and her decided they needed to leave. She tried to pack her things but her body shook profusely. More so than that, she realised then that the only material thing she needed was her passport—her furniture, electronics, books, all those items that had given her life some sense of meaning were no longer necessary. The walls of her past life crumbled with every subsequent explosion that rattled the windows, with every incessant ping of another notification on her phone. The world was born anew. No longer one defined by the peaceful joy of a life led in normalcy, but one marred by war, destruction, and death.
It took Masha and her boyfriend a whole day to gather the people they knew to leave. She still remembers the endless lines of cars, all filled with people driven by the same urge to escape Kyiv. Families with all their belongings stuffed inside tiny vehicles, even others who’d abandoned their cars after it’d run out of fuel. When they finally reached their haven outside of the city—a second home owned by her boyfriend’s family—Masha finally got to catch her breath. Then again, for the months and years that would follow, it would be difficult to ever really breathe normally again. How could she, when her life had been turned upside down? Even on that first day of the Russian invasion, she watched videos of Russian tanks as they entered Kyiv and rumbled through streets her friends used to live in. Masha tried her best to cope, even logging into her work’s online platform because she thought she’d still have tasks to complete but alas, there was nothing for her to do but survive.
Masha ended up staying in that house for six months. At one point, a separate family joined them because their house had been bombed. As she put it, a weird sense of community formed among this mix of acquaintances and strangers. With every passing day, it was as if they were turning into a makeshift family. Despite the horrors of war unfolding around them, she felt safer given that she wasn’t suffering alone. A peculiar normalcy settled, and though she hated to admit it, Masha said she got used to the war. In the evenings lights would go out given the curfew and Masha and everyone she lived with would gather around the dining table to eat, chat, and drink horilka (Ukrainian for vodka). Some nights the fear paralysed them into complete silence. However, day times could be even trickier. A whole group having to line up for a single bathroom, feeling obliged to make conversation when what you wanted most was a space to settle into your own silence. When the sirens wailed, they’d hide underneath the floorboards for protection—places where every Ukrainian child knew their grandma stored her preserves. Out of everything, Masha recalls one night most vividly. Stepping outside for a cigarette in the fields, she looked up and saw Ukraine’s night sky emblazoned with more stars than she’d ever seen in her life. Given the light’s-out curfew, those stars were the only light for her to see, and how equally heavenly and tragic they appeared.
As for her family, Masha kept in touch with them through phone calls. While she hid underneath the floorboards, they’d chosen the inside of their bathtub as their place of protection. They’d remained in Kherson for a while but one day they made their escape, shoving everything they could in their car, driving through a field to a nearby town where they had a second home similar to the one Masha ended up sheltering in. However, even that location wasn’t much better than remaining in Kherson. Once Russians started invading this second town, they knew they had to find a way out of the country. On the way, they stopped by to retrieve their daughter, and yet Masha didn’t feel as if she could leave her boyfriend, friends, and her makeshift family who had come to mean so much to her. She reunited with her family for just that one night, promising that she would be safe and join them on another occasion.
Winter passed into spring. Masha had long since been fired from her job, as had many of her fellow countrymen. War had ceased to be that unknown dread—now it was something people went to sleep knowing they’d wake up to. “What can I do to feel as if I was living? As if I’d lived my life?” she wondered. At that moment, her answer was surprisingly clear: acting. She wanted, however she could, to get back into acting. Still, there was a problem. She knew she couldn’t do so in Ukraine. While many Ukrainians were doing their best to accept fate and move on with their lives, Masha knew she needed to get out to restart. Her family was in Macedonia at that point so she decided it was time for her to join them. With farewells and more promises that she would be safe—that she’d return— Masha took a train out of the country.
In Macedonia, Masha made a few self-tapes which she sent out to various projects. Even though the roles fell through, it felt good to be auditioning again. Through this process of diving back into the art form that had captivated her for years, she was able to regain some sense of a life worth living. However, this path back into acting wouldn’t last long. While Masha was with her family in Macedonia, she found out that Tom—her ex-boyfriend who now worked in Japan’s filmmaking industry—was planning on documenting interviews of Ukrainian refugees in Poland. There was just one problem: they didn’t have a translator. The two spoke and Masha agreed to help. Before she knew it Masha was in Warsaw, Poland, where she met Tom for the first time in years. Amidst the backdrop of her home that was being ravaged by war, here was Tom, the boy she’d dated back at school in England, now older, now more of a man. So much had changed in each of their lives and yet the love they’d shared as teenagers had never disappeared—it’d only evolved. Travelling to a town in northern Poland called Szczecin, Masha helped translate the stories of Ukrainian refugees that had been forced to rebuild their lives outside of their home. Listening to the tales of their hardship was heartbreaking, and yet it was also inspiring to hear of their unwavering courage. This reaffirmed a belief that had been growing in Masha for some time: she couldn’t let the war define her. The only way to live was to keep moving forward. After four days in Szczecin, Masha, Tom, and the rest of the crew spent a night in Berlin as a finale to their trip. Afterwards, Tom and the crew returned to Japan while Masha found her way back to Ukraine.
Masha and Tom stayed in touch after that. It was a difficult, confusing period for the both of them. While their feelings for each other were unquestionable, given that they were both in relationships, this separation served as a way for them to figure out their next plans on their own. For Masha, the newfound sense of freedom and hope that acting in Macedonia and helping Tom with his documentary imbued in her spirit meant that the more she thought about it, the more she knew it was true: she had to accept and try to move on from the war. Besides the refugees she interviewed in Poland, she saw countless other Ukrainians coming to the same understanding. They couldn’t let the war define them. How long, after all, were they meant to cower away, waiting for their lives to return to the state it’d been before the invasion? Already in cities like Kyiv citizens could be seen out on the streets, commuting to work, meeting at cafes and restaurants, enjoying—as best they could—the time they had in front of them. A couple of months after Tom left, he reached out to Masha once more and told her that he’d received enough funding for a larger-scale documentary. This time they’d travel throughout Ukraine and they wanted her to help translate again.
Masha spent around a month on the road with Tom and the crew. The sights she saw all around her country emboldened her. There were people everywhere who chose to let themselves be moved by love and faith, and being in the proximity of the beauty of their strength, Masha felt the drive to do more as well. Besides that, there was her love with Tom that continued to blossom. In a testament to his feelings, he’d ended his previous relationship by then, though Masha still remained in hers. Despite that, every night they sat together, spent hours chatting away amidst candlelight while the refraction from the explosions of bombs outside the window cast their own flaming gleam onto the world. Apart from those eternal conversations, Masha recounted their time in west Ukraine as being among the most memorable. The bombings there were especially bad and a cloud of uncertainty fogged the region. They were even watching the news one time when they found out the park they used to take morning walks through had been blown apart by a missile strike. The fragility of existence was never more apparent, and consequently, life in the moment never felt more rich. From there, things moved quickly. Masha’s father advised her against returning to Kyiv given how prolonged the war could end up becoming. Instead, Masha and Tom headed to Warsaw where they spent time with friends before they uttered their second farewell. Afterwards, Masha headed to Croatia—where her family now resided. It was at this crossroad when Masha was figuring out how to move forward that Tom invited her to Japan to finish working on the documentary. It was December 2022, ten months after Russia had invaded Ukraine. She went with the intention of leaving after a few weeks. Little did she know how long she’d stay.
Tokyo was the first Asian city Masha had even been to. It captivated her as it does so many, but at times it could be intense. In particular, she noted how overpowering the capital’s lights could be. She recalled the curfew she’d had to live under in Ukraine, where every evening the country dropped into a darkness that could only be broken by dawn’s first sunlight. Then as the war progressed, many of Ukraine’s key infrastructure had been destroyed and so sometimes there was no power throughout the day. Tokyo was the opposite. Bright. Neon. Futuristic. A city as tech-forward as you could expect, in equal parts utopian and dystopian. Coming to grips with the dichotomy of the two countries wasn’t easy, but it’s one that Masha’s grown to tolerate with time.
Being with Tom also helped. Masha broke up with her boyfriend, but her and Tom took things slow for the first couple of months she was in the city. Still, their love at that point was free to grow as it pleased, which is why in February 2023, Tom proposed to Masha. They opted to sign papers announcing their marriage at a local city hall, and promised to have a proper wedding once the war in Ukraine ended. And so a year after her home had been invaded, Masha was married to her childhood sweetheart. So much had changed in a year and there’d been so much pain—yet in many ways, life was looking up for Masha. But then again, reality isn’t always so kind.
The sorrows and tragedies of war don’t end just because you remove yourself from the fight. War is a weight on your shoulders. War is the elephant in the room that no one but you can see. And the worst part is that the burden of war never seems to get any lighter, regardless of the distance you place between yourself and the fighting, or the time you’ve endured since the fighting began. Though Masha could no longer hear the sirens announcing another bomb threat, though she could walk down Tokyo’s streets without worry of an impending missile strike, what she couldn’t do was forget that Ukraine—home—was still under attack. Every time she watched the news she felt an irrepressible pang of guilt. She was in Japan and yet so many of her loved ones were still in Ukraine. How can I move on? But what use would I have been if I’d stayed in Ukraine? What value would I have had if my days were driven and paralysed by fear? Masha learned that there really was no right or wrong way to feel about everything. Instead, everyday became a kind of battle. Some days she was happy and grateful for her situation. On others, she couldn’t help but be confused and unsure of what to do. Taking each day as it came, three years passed since Masha moved to Japan.
Masha’s done her best so far. Beyond settling into married life with Tom, there have been a few things she’s focused on to move forward with her life. Of course, acting has played a major part. While she admits she hasn’t been involved with as many projects as she would like, Masha’s made the most of every opportunity, building her portfolio through commercials, voice acting, and a few short films. Of the latter, she was the lead in a short horror film called “Without a Sound”. Despite it being her first ever time acting in a horror film, being able to encapsulate the mind, body, and soul of a character renewed her love for the art form. On this note, when I asked whether the war had changed her as an actress, Masha told me that the emotional depths she can now reach are unexplainable. She believes she’s become more sensitive and empathetic, and doesn’t think she’s completely grasped just how deep that emotional well inside of her now goes.
Besides acting, Masha’s been heavily involved with pop-ups and supper clubs. She explained that she always had an interest in cooking, and so when she moved to Tokyo, she decided to try working in a kitchen as a means of earning an income. Starting in a small restaurant, she would go on to serve as its sous chef. She spoke about the experience fondly given that she was able to cook from the get-go and because she had a great chef mentoring her. Once she moved on from that role, she wanted to continue pursuing cooking which is why she got into catering for production sets. Though mainly focused on breakfast catering, this position allowed Masha to be the mastermind behind her meals, and as she started posting images of her dishes online, word spread. It was at that point one of Masha’s friends told her about a lady who was looking for a cook for a supper club, and so she went to meet her. The two clicked and this was Masha’s entryway into the world of supper clubs. As she put it, the supper club she’s part of is more like an artistic dinner party, often held inside UltraSuperNew Kura, an art gallery where an artist is showcasing their work. She loves it given that she has creative control of her menu—this often means food that isn’t tied to a single cuisine, is seasonal, and makes you happy when you take a bite. Whenever she can, she’ll try to season her food with elements of Ukraine, just like how at her first supper club she got yeast from Ukraine to bake focaccia with. Through acting and cooking, Masha’s gradually been able to build out a space for herself in Tokyo.
So, how does war change you? Through listening to and writing Masha’s story, I’ve come to learn more about human sorrow and tragedy than I otherwise would’ve expected to find out from a friend. And yet Masha’s story isn’t merely about the depths of sadness that people can be pushed into, it’s also about the courage and spirit that can only be discovered in those darkest and most depraved of human experiences. It revealed a lot when I asked Masha what her goals were. She responded by saying all that matters to her now are the things in her control like being a good partner, daughter, and sister. She also wants to continue making art and cooking for those she cares about and those she might only feed for one evening. In that statement, I understood all I needed to. War changes you in more ways than you can count. War changes you in more ways than you might want to admit. Ultimately, however, war changes you by holding up a mirror to life and revealing two truths: as much as there’s pain and suffering, there can also be love and beauty. Which truth you decide to live by is up to yourself, but if you decide to commit to the hard thing like Masha’s done—as many Ukrainians have done—what you’ll find is the strength to fight another day.
