A sorrow beyond words
For workers who survived a deadly Russian attack on a book publishing plant, there are no answers
Sergey Markov (left) and Andriy Kalanchuk survived a Russian missile strike on the Faktor Druk printing plant in the northeastern city of Kharkiv last month that killed seven of their coworkers. (c. Martin Kuz)
The usual din of voices and machines carried through the Faktor Druk printing plant as the clock ticked past 10 a.m. on a weekday morning in late May. In the bookbinding section, more than two dozen workers operated equipment to sort, trim and glue together neat stacks of paper, transforming loose pages of text into rectangles of literature.
Andriy Kalanchuk, the plant’s 39-year-old production manager, and his longtime associate, Sergey Markov, chatted while they walked past metal shelves stacked high with unbound pages before turning down a hallway. A few seconds later they heard the loudest noise of their lives as a Russian missile slammed into the factory.
The two men ran back to the bookbinding area, where dense smoke rose from flames feeding on tons of paper. In the debris, they saw the incinerated bodies of coworkers. Others writhed on the ground, flesh seared, limbs broken. Two women, their clothes smeared with blood, dragged a gravely wounded colleague toward an exit. Andriy and Sergey rushed forward to aid survivors as the fire intensified.
“It was something more than a nightmare,” Andriy said as he and Sergey showed me the ruined space two weeks after the May 23 attack. The burned pages of 50,000 books layered the concrete floor as sunlight poured through the demolished steel roof. “It happens in an instant and you know this moment will stay with you forever.”
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Rebuilding the space and replacing the equipment will take six to eight months. At right, the sealing machine that Tetiana Khrapina was operating when the blast ended her life. (c. Martin Kuz)
The strike on the factory in the northeastern city of Kharkiv killed seven of their fellow employees and wounded 22. We walked over to the spot where Tetiana Khrapina had stood working when the missile ended her life. Sergey, 40, pointed at a pair of blackened scissors lying on the flat base of the charred sealing machine that she operated. “It looks like she will come back to finish the shift,” he said. “Just away for a minute.”
Sergey joined Faktor Druk in 2004, a decade before Andriy, and they have helped the company grow into one of Europe’s largest printing houses. Founded in 1996, the plant had reached an output of 50 million books by 2022, handling orders for 30 fiction, nonfiction, children’s and education book publishers in Ukraine and dozens more abroad.
The start of Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago forced Faktor Druk to stop the presses as Kharkiv endured heavy bombardment during the war’s first months. After Ukrainian troops pushed out the Russian military from the city’s perimeter that spring and from most of the Kharkiv region in the fall, the company began the slow process of restocking its workforce.
Half of the plant’s 400 employees had joined the military or fled to safer areas of Ukraine or other countries early in the war. Many trickled back into the city after the Russians retreated, and along with the hiring of new personnel, Faktor Druk had returned to close to full production capacity by last summer. The machines clattered and clanked as the massive plant once again resounded with the dissonant symphony of making books.
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The 50,000 books destroyed in the attack included novels in Ukrainian and English and children’s literature. (c. Martin Kuz)
Fifty people worked in the binding shop that occupied about a quarter of the 16,000-square-meter factory. Rebuilding the space and replacing the equipment will take six to eight months. No timeline exists for repairing the heartache of employees who lived through the blast.
“Most of us had been together here 15 or 20 years,” Sergey said. “Now you don’t see your work family. You feel…” He pulled out his phone to search for the right word in English. “You feel hollow.”
By pure chance, he and Andriy had walked about 50 feet outside the binding shop when the missile hit, enough distance to spare them from physical injury apart from Sergey’s ruptured eardrums. A sense of survivor’s guilt shadows them. Each day when entering the plant’s lobby, workers pass by a framed photo display that honors the memory of their seven dead colleagues. As my visit ended, I stood beside Andriy, the father of two young children, as he stared at the tribute to his lost friends.
“You can’t explain that they are gone,” he said. “They had families, lives, hopes — all taken away.” He turned and looked at me, his eyes holding a sorrow beyond words. “For what?”