"Three Bags of Ladies Clothes & a Sniper” An Interview with Author Jaap Scholten

Joint event with Helena History Press.

When on 24 February 2022 Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jaap Scholten went to the border to help a young family from Kyiv. In the weeks and months that followed, he became more and more involved in the conflict.

Scholten collected money for drones, traveled with an American sniper in his pickup through the country at war, and attended a funeral in Irpin with the director of a Kyiv cake factory. From the American sniper, Scholten heard about life at the front and about the mission to save a six-day-old baby from an underground hospital in Mariupol.

Three Bags of Ladies Clothes & a Sniper is a personal logbook and a unique report of the astonishing courage, resilience, and solidarity that the war has unleashed in the Ukrainians.

John O’Sullivan, President of the Danube Institute, will discuss this very personal book with the author.

Jaap Scholten is a Dutchman who has lived mainly in Hungary since 2003.  He is married to the daughter of a Hungarian refugee from the 1956 Revolution and has travelled Central and Eastern Europe extensively. He is an award-winning author of travel stories and novels, including Tachtig, De Wet van Spengler and Suikerbastaard. For Comrade Baron, he was nominated for the VPRO Bob den Uyl Prize and awarded the Libris History Prize. His books and stories have been translated into English, German, French, Hungarian, Croatian and Romanian.