Summer camp, at its purest, is like Never-Never-Land—a place that exists only in childhood or in memories of it: lake swimming, tree climbing, secret telling, frog catching, and youth everlasting. When I found myself recently on a train platform in Lviv, Ukraine, surrounded by teenagers heading to summer camp in the Carpathian Mountains, such wholesome pleasures seemed almost ridiculously out of reach.
The train was running late, for one thing. And shortly after we’d learned of the delay, an air-raid siren began to howl, starting an uncomfortable countdown that the locals knew too well. After a siren begins, rockets can take up to 20 minutes or so to strike.