Name: Ksenia Filonenko
Born — Location: Russia - Georgia
I'm Ksenia, an artist and musician.When the war started, my husband and I left Russia after two weeks, knowing we wouldn't return soon. We stayed in Georgia, where we met many talented people and faced the challenges of emigration together. After a year and a half, we repatriated to Israel, but in October, the war reached us again, this time too close. So we left once more, spending time in Thailand and Europe, and have now returned to Georgia.
In recent years, the concept of "death" has repeatedly forced me to rethink everything. I have a tendency to dig deep into the essence of things, trying to feel the closeness of death, physical pain, and suffering. I find inspiration there, though rarely joy. Now I know for certain—death is very near. With the onset of war, I gained different experiences of "death": witnessing how people live beside it, within it, and after it. This includes life in Israel, sitting under a barrage of rockets, and the reality of friends, sometimes even loved ones, dying under bombs—or others, equally close, going off to kill and taking pride in it. The difficulty of comprehending "death" is overwhelming. It changes people. This summer, I spent a lot of time in Nuremberg, Germany—the very city known as the cradle of Nazism. I learned much about the Germans. Their collective experience of mass murder seems largely unprocessed. But can we truly label death as evil? I believe it has many facets, because "death" itself is, after all, quite natural.