Waiting for my Dad - Ukraine's children of the missing

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A pioneering summer camp for Ukrainian children with missing parents.

According to the Ukrainian government more than 70 thousand people are missing in the war, leaving families, including thousands of children, anxious for news of their loved ones and unable to move on.

Psychologists say these children are some of the most traumatised they have worked with.

Now for the first time a leading Ukrainian children’s charity is putting on a special summer camp for some of these children, offering them therapy, fun activities and a safe place.

For Assignment, Will Vernon is given exclusive access to this project, where psychologists are developing a new framework to treat these deeply traumatised children.

This episode of The Documentary comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rise and shine in Western Ukraine.
0:09.6	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:13.8	I'm Will Vernon, and this is assignment at a special summer camp in the Carpathian Mountains.
0:20.5	It's just after 8 in the morning, and the kids at the camp are being woken up by
0:24.6	Ukrainian pop songs, and they're emerging from their rooms, quite bleary-eyed, actually.
0:29.3	And the first activity of the morning is exercise, and they've got a patch schedule for the day ahead.
0:37.8	We have really busy program because kids, if they have five, three minutes, they are just
0:44.8	doing chaos.
0:46.6	You need only five minutes for that, and they're doing some crazy stuff.
0:55.3	This is a camp for the children of Ukraine's missing.
0:59.4	50 of them, aged between 7 and 17, with one thing in common.
1:04.0	They all have a parent who's disappeared in the war.
1:07.5	We've been given exclusive access to this pioneering project, the first camp of its kind.
1:13.5	We're spending several days with the children, camp staff and psychologists.
1:18.2	Many of these children have multiple traumas because not only their fathers are missing,
1:25.3	but some of them have uncles missing, grandfathers missing, and we are working
1:31.8	with all of it, like one huge, painful hole that we are trying to heal.
1:39.2	Van Wyi Matirassian is the chief psychologist of Gen Ukrainian, the charity running this two-week camp.
1:45.6	This type of trauma is really difficult and there is no ready program for children.
1:52.9	Ambiguous loss is really difficult to cope with because there is no closed point.
1:59.4	Tell me what is ambiguous loss.
2:00.7	So ambiguous loss is that type of loss where you do not know whether your loved ones are alive or dead,
	...

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