Arthur Bondar looked forward to childhood summers when he shuttled between his grandmothers, who lived in different rural areas of Ukraine. He wandered the countryside picking mushrooms and fishing, and at night he listened to their stories about World War II, when the Nazis pressed them into slave labor. He grew so fascinated by the Ukrainian wartime experience that when he became a photographer, he spent years documenting that generation of Ukrainian and Russian veterans.
“I consider all of the older generation who went through World War II, like my grandmas, to be heroes of that generation,” he said.
