I am aboard a train from Warsaw to Kyiv, well into Ukrainian territory now. I hope to write something of substance about my week in this country, but my main reflections should wait until I have listened and learned and found the right voice.

I don’t want to pretend to any real knowledge based on a few days in a large country where I cannot even fluently decode the alphabet, let alone study the range of opinion. (I have been here three times before, but always as a brief and superficial observer, which will be the case again this week.)

And I want to find a voice than it not about me, because more than 35 million people live here all the time. Everyone else on this train holds a Ukrainian passport; I saw the whole stack in the arms of the border guard. The people who spend months and years in a war deserve attention, not the guy with the dark-blue passport who can leave when he wants.

I have come in solidarity. That is not a big thing to do; it is a small thing. But it is not nothing, and it seems important right now not to do nothing. Solidarity, plus a desire to learn from activists here, explains my visit.

For the moment, I will just share that a rail journey from Warsaw via Chelm to Kyiv seems haunted. It’s a journey from the site of the Warsaw ghetto, via a town where 60 Jews out of 15,000 survived, to the site of Babi Yar. Our path cuts through the Pale of Settlement, albeit perhaps south of its middle and south of the part of Belarus from which my paternal ancestors escaped in the early 1900s. Trains have rolled back and forth in this region with cargoes of people for mass murder and with soldiers to kill and be killed. (We are currently stopped in Kovel, whose large Jewish community was wiped out, for the most part on the single day of June 28, 1941).

The train that I am riding must have already served the Soviet Union, and the vast majority of the passengers today are women and small children—presumably because most Ukrainian men are not allowed to exit. As we move past farms and through birch-sprinkled woods, the past seems very close.