In the midst of suffering, fear and despair, being able to keep an eye on the absurd situations that naturally also – or even more so – exist in a war is a gift.
Anja Wolz seems to have this gift.
Anyone who contacts the Doctors Without Borders employee via Whatsapp will see a green helmet on her profile picture, which is lying on a table with the opening facing up and is used to store a bag of gummy bears.
It's not a combat helmet, Wolz explains, but a safety helmet that caught her eye in a Kiev clinic because it was being misused.
Eva sleeper
Editor in the "Life" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
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"I thought that was funny," says the registered nurse with the dark gray curls, who describes herself as basically an optimist and good at keeping her distance from what's going on around her with a mixture of professionalism and flippancy.
However, it is difficult for her at the moment.
But that doesn't mean she can't do it at all.
At the end of a long phone call between Frankfurt and Kyiv, she says: "I'd rather have an Ebola outbreak than this."
On February 23, a Wednesday, Anja Wolz flew from Kyiv to Brussels.
Her plan was: take a few days vacation.
The trained nurse has been working for Doctors Without Borders since 2003 and has been deployed in crisis regions around the world: including Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
After 15 years "in the field," as she calls it, the 51-year-old wanted to lead a more settled life and moved to the Brussels headquarters of the aid organization.
Since then, as emergency coordinator, she has been responsible for Ukraine, among other things.
Since this activity does not exclude local assignments, Wolz was in the east of the country in January and February, where Doctors Without Borders carried out projects for tuberculosis and HIV-infected people.
Training in War Surgery
On February 24, the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Wolz immediately dropped vacation and became part of a Doctors Without Borders task force.
Around March 1st - "I can't get the days together anymore, I'm sorry" - she flew to Hungary, drove from there over the Carpathians to Lviv, then on to Kyiv.
In the capital, which two weeks earlier she had perceived as "chic" with its coffee bars, the shelling was so intense that she was temporarily unable to leave the basement of the Okhmatdyt Clinic, Ukraine's largest children's hospital.
As a "firefighter", she coordinated the logistics and transport of medical supplies, made arrangements with hospitals and other helpers and organized training courses,
She saw the local doctors she dealt with send their wives and children out of the country, move to the hospital, and close ranks.
"The courage and solidarity among each other impress me very much," says Wolz.
These first days in the war zone were interrupted by an evacuation, as Médecins Sans Frontières assessed the risk as too great for its own employees.
Wolz sat in a packed train to Lemberg for ten hours.
Once there, she gave an interview to Caren Miosga for the "Tagesthemen" and talked about newborns in incubators that could not be evacuated.
A few days later she drove back to Kyiv.
Anja Wolz describes rail transport as the "lifeline" for the country and is full of admiration for the Ukrainian railway workers.
Working with them, Doctors Without Borders managed to get a three-car evacuation train onto the tracks that, on its first trip two weeks ago, brought 40 patients from Donetsk in the east to the west of the country and has been in regular service ever since.
Earlier this week they managed to bring to Lviv 90 orphans who had made it to Zaporizhia from Mariupol.
Meanwhile, in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, a MSF team has launched mobile clinics in the city's metro stations, where more than 800 residents have already received medical care.