Voices Within: Family Chronicles

Some stories begin before you arrive. This one begins with a death that no one was allowed to name.

Lana Stasek was that arrival - born five years later, into the space her unborn brother left behind. He was erased before she arrived. His presence stayed - in the weight she carried without explanation, in the guilt of simply being here, in the sense that she was living for two.

She grew up in Lisichansk, Eastern Ukraine, in a family where trauma didn't have a name - it had a belt, a slammed d...