Balloons strictly forbidden

We say: there’s no place for childhood at war. Instead, we should be saying: there’s no place for war in childhood.

“Balloons strictly forbidden.” This sentence, in capital letters with three exclamation marks on a sheet of paper stuck to the door of the crèche at a refugee centre in Warsaw in 2022, could compete with Hemingway’s famous saddest, shortest story – if it weren’t fiction but a document of what Russian aggression does to millions of Ukrainian children (le…