The particular perils facing 5- to 9-year-old kids “speaks to the indiscriminate nature, the intensity of the bombardment,” said Elder. “But with kids that age it’s that hellish moment of an inferno coming at you, knowing that there’s missile attacks. If you’re under 5, quite likely you’ll be carried. If you’re over 9 or 10, quite likely you’re able to run. From 5 to 9 you have that peak of vulnerability.”
The vulnerability for all kids is profound, physically and psychologically.
“I’ve worked a lot of time in Africa and not always in the Middle East and Ukraine,” Elder said. “We’ve got to always be careful [in comparing] crises. But when I look at places like Gaza now, I see the intensity of hundreds of thousands of children displaced in such a small amount of time. Here you see the suffering stretch the limits of what we thought was possible. Gaza, particularly, is utterly, utterly rock-bottom.”
What’s sanitized for big-screen cinema like “Blitz” and for small-screen newscasts is witnessed without filters by Elder and other humanitarian workers. What they see are “children lying on the floor who so clearly need attention, limbs that have been amputated or that will be amputated, seeing hundreds of children who absolutely will die,” often from shrapnel “designed to rip through concrete; you can imagine what it does to a child’s body. The burns — I’ll never forget the smell of children’s burning flesh.”
A woman carries her child as they evacuate from a residential building which was hit by a Russian rocket at the city center of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Jan. 30, 2023. (Andrii Marienko/The Associated Press)
The psychological toll of children under today’s blitzes is extraordinary and likely enduring, Elder said. Including in eastern Ukraine, where some kids “have literally spent thousands of hours, the equivalent of four or five or six months, underground, simply because of the perpetual threat of air raids. And so the psychological impact on them, it’s uncharted territory.”
