What does it mean to have roots in different places? Karine Zenja Versluis began with a place name preserved in family memory as “Debaltsevo,” the Donbas city where her grandmother was born before being forced to work in a German labour camp during the Second World War. In 2013, Versluis decided to explore her family history in Debaltseve, Ukraine. Over more than ten years, everything went differently than expected, and the search itself became the common thread.

Across 148 pages, the book combines archival images, photographs, and texts in English, with Dutch and Ukrainian translations available online. It follows the grandmother’s story, introduces three Ukrainian families who had to flee Debaltseve in 2015 and 2022 due to another war, and travels with the narrator from the Netherlands to Ukraine in search of a city she may never find. Constantly overtaken by current events, her plans keep changing, symbolising the puzzling search for her own identity.

Published by Eriskay Connection as a Japanese-bound softcover, 165 by 240 millimetres, the first edition is 750 copies. Concept, photography, and text are by Karine Zenja Versluis. Jeremy Jansen designed the book and edited the images with Femke Lutgerink and Versluis. Text editing is by Tanya van der Spek and Enne Koens. Interviews were conducted by Iryna Kyporenko and Kateryna Levchenko. The work is a constructed narrative assembled with editors and translators, treating interruption as structure: plans change, and the search for a stable origin keeps yielding to displacement.