The Quiet That Remains

About the Book

As war once again reshapes Europe, Ukraine stands at the centre of events whose roots stretch far beyond the present. The pressures of occupation, repression, and displacement have shaped ordinary lives there for more than a century, leaving behind a history felt more than it is told.

The Quiet That Remains traces that longer history through an intimate, documented account of one family.

An old-fashioned suitcase sat at the back of a cupboard for seventy years. Unopened. Unexamined. Its presence acknowledged; its contents left untouched. When it was finally opened by the grandson of its keeper, it revealed the hidden traces of lives lived in the shadows of empires and totalitarian rule: military billets, brittle identity cards, a worn leather wallet, scraps of poetry written in secret.

Tracing a family of psalmists and villagers from the heartlands of central Ukraine, Ben Skliar-Ward reconstructs a hundred-year journey through occupation, famine, war, and exile. From the collapse of the Cossack Hetmanate to the Holodomor, and from Nazi occupation to Cold War exile in Britain, this is a history built from fragments: documents that survived by chance and memories shaped by silence and constraint.

The book follows these fragments across borders and regimes, setting family memory alongside official records. It pays close attention to what was written down, what was altered, and what was never recorded at all, exploring the habits, rituals, and silences through which identity endured when speaking openly carried risk.

Drawing on state archives, parish registers, and family papers, this narrative history examines how lives are shaped when power is unstable, borders shift, and speech carries risk. Through the Ukrainian experience, it explores how memory is preserved, altered, or lost, and how people adapt to survive when history is made elsewhere, revealing patterns that recur whenever states fracture and authority hardens.

About the Author

Ben Skliar-Ward is a writer and archival researcher with family roots in central Ukraine. Prompted by the discovery of his grandfather’s archive, he spent years tracing lives across parish registers, refugee documentation, and Soviet-era material, reconstructing histories shaped by survival, adaptation, and silence. The Quiet That Remains is his first book.