Volodymyr Zelenskyy: belief

Transcript context

…My grandfather, he graduated from the military academy, and from the very beginning of the war, he went to fight. He was in the infantry and he fought through the entire war. He had many wounds, as they used to say back then, “His chest is covered in medals,” and it’s true. He had more than 30? Yes, more than 30. He was the kind of man… He was such a serious man. I loved him very much, and we had a very close relationship. He didn’t like to tell details about the war. He never boasted, although I asked him as a boy would, “How many fascists did you kill?” He never talked about it. He believed that the war was a great tragedy. A tragedy for everyone. And Ukraine was occupied, and it was a tragedy for Ukraine, a tragedy for Europe, and a tragedy for the Jewish people. His own brothers, his entire family were executed. They were tortured by fascists who had occupied Ukraine and their village. His father was the head of the village and he was killed. They were shot. It was a mass… A mass grave, right? Yes. It was a communal burial. Some of them were killed outright and others, they were buried alive. His four brothers, they all went to war. As soon as the war began, they were all there. He was the only one who had a military education, and they all died in the war. He was the only one who came back. He had nobody. He came back and he found my grandmother, his future wife, and she managed… What was it called then? I don’t know. They don’t have them anymore. It was a child care facility, an orphanage, so to speak, a place where orphans lived, children who don’t have parents, children of war. And she managed this child care facility with difficult children, as they used to call them, difficult children who went through the war, who saw their parents killed, and this is how they met, because these difficult children, they, well, sometimes behave differently. They could steal something, do something bad. There were many, many children in the orphanage. Yes, that’s how she met my grandfather, and I loved him very much, and I think that my grandfather, frankly would never have believed that this war is possible. He would never have believed it because he worked in the police after the war. He was a colonel. He worked in a criminal investigation all his life, so he fought with bandits all his life, after the Second World War, but also I believe he fought for justice all his life. And we all lived in one apartment, and even after his death, I lived with both of my grandmothers and my parents, two grandmothers who both lost their husbands. Both of them died. ustice all his life. And we all lived in one apartment, and even after his death, I lived with both of my grandmothers and my parents, two grandmothers who both lost their husbands. Both of them died. Well, it was an ordinary family, an ordinary family that lived like everyone lived back then in the Soviet Union and even after the Soviet in the nineties, we lived in one apartment all together. What else is there to say? But I think the most important thing was values, respect. They gave me an education. My parents gave me an education, no one left me money or apartments, so I didn’t inherit anything material. But I believe that our real inheritance is here, in our minds and in our hearts. I believe that. Understood. There’s just a one-second delay, so if… I’m sorry, if you-…

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