Displaced, page 8
Despite all the efforts of the psychologists and volunteers in the humanitarian centers, many refugees make mistakes in choosing the country of their placement. So, the fifth important rule for refugees, a rule that needs to be followed before war breaks out: travel. Try to see the world, take note of different customs, and make new acquaintances. Who knows, maybe tomorrow, when your country is being bombed, these strangers will give you shelter.
THE HOSTS
The people who host immigrants are a strange breed. In volunteer organizations, people who are ready to take refugees into their homes are called hosts. Apart from basic human compassion, these hosts are driven by another remarkable feeling—that of belonging to a community where it’s the norm to offer people in trouble a place in your own home.
Yuri and Karina Kovalchuk find their hosts by chance. When it comes to the five ground rules for refugees mentioned above, Yuri and Karina broke them all. We remember that Karina gave all her food to an unknown woman at the Kyiv railway station. Then, with her son and an unliftable suitcase, she somehow made it to Romania, and there they kept making one mistake after another. They should’ve registered and received assistance, but Karina didn’t do that. They should’ve stayed somewhere for free, but Karina and Yuri arranged to meet in Suceava, a city in Romania, and get a hotel room. So, they pay for things they could have gotten for free. They meet and hug each other. Yuri can’t hold back his tears, while Karina, who throughout her travels has been dreaming of this moment—of how she’d finally melt into her husband’s arms and weep—can’t shed a tear.
And then they make more mistakes. They should’ve carefully picked their future country of relocation and their itinerary with the help of psychologists and volunteers in the humanitarian center. But Yuri and Karina run into some random acquaintances who are driving to Milan in their own car and can take them along. Yuri and Karina agree to go with them, but they have no idea why Italy is better for them than, let’s say, Germany, or Belgium, or Spain. In Italy they can’t find jobs or shelter, and in desperation they call their friend in Cologne. This friend is a doctor, and when Yuri and Karina call him, he’s with patients—a middle-aged couple, Lutz and Galina. Their children have grown up and moved out, and now the couple lives by themselves in their spacious apartment. Yes, yes! They’d be happy to take the refugees into their home.
This seemed like a miracle, a happy coincidence; they got lucky. But while Yuri and Karina may have found their hosts by chance, Lutz and Galina became their hosts by design. They aren’t overly religious, but there is a famous pastor in their town. This pastor used to help refugees during the Yugoslav Wars and the Syrian civil war. Now, because of this pastor, helping refugees has become a custom in their parish. This is what I mean by saying that, as a rule, people become hosts because they belong to a particular community.
The biggest communities are on the Internet, such as Facebook and Telegram. Alexander Auzan, dean of the School of Economics at Moscow State University, says that large social networks play a part in this war comparable to that of states. Great Britain protects the interests of British citizens, Germany takes care of German citizens, but Facebook—not as a commercial enterprise, but as a community of people—protects its own citizens, the members of Facebook.
When Rita Vinokur, one of the Rubikus community founders, is on call for the first time, and for the first time has to assign refugees to host families, the following message appears in her chatroom:
“Hello, we’re a family of five, taking the train from Kraków to Berlin. We’ll arrive in Berlin at midnight. What should we do?”
In Europe, it will be 8:00 P.M. In Pennsylvania, where Rita is, it’s noon, thank God. There’s some time left, but Rita is inexperienced and doesn’t realize that someone will definitely volunteer to meet the refugee family and help them. She immediately starts searching for an apartment where she can accommodate five people, in literally four hours.
Rita has access to the Rubikus chatroom and has accounts on various social networks, and so she asks:
“Folks, who knows where I can find a place to stay for five people in Germany ASAP?” In response, she receives words of support—but they’re not productive. Statements like “It’s impossible to find an apartment for five people in four hours” are even less productive. But finally, she gets word that there’s an apartment in Munich, and they’re ready to take in the family. Hurrah! Rita begins searching for a driver with a car big enough for five people and their luggage and who’d be ready to meet the refugees at the train station at midnight and take them immediately across the country to Munich. There are more words of support in her chatroom—but they don’t help. Some comment that such drivers don’t exist, until finally she receives the following message—there’s a driver with a minivan who’s ready to take off from Berlin at midnight and take the refugee family anywhere, even to Mars.
Meanwhile Rita chats with this poor family and learns that none of them speaks any languages other than Russian and a little Ukrainian. This is bad because the driver speaks only German and a little English. They’ll have to communicate using signs. Rita also learns that there’s very little money left on the family’s phone and they don’t know how to add more money in Germany. And also . . .
But then there’s an unexpected blow. The host from Munich calls and apologizes, saying that he can’t house any more people in his apartment. He’s a very kind person but very absent-minded too. He lets anyone who asks stay in his apartment, but he totally forgot that a while ago he promised to host another family, and that family is moving in as we speak, all of them, with children, suitcases and a chinchilla.
And so, everything starts over. Once again, there’s the Rubikus chatroom, social networks, useless comments about the impossibility of finding an apartment for five people in the two hours remaining, until finally someone in the chat mentions Woman-with-Swans. This woman lives in a faraway village. Several times she’s contacted volunteer organizations on the Internet and offered her big house for refugees. Volunteers named her Women-with-Swans because her offers always come with bedroom pictures attached. Those bedrooms are in perfect German order: ironed comforters, neatly tucked-in blankets, and an Alpine-white towel folded in the shape of a swan on every bed.
So, everything is working out. The driver meets this family of five in Berlin. Woman-with-Swans waits for them until 5:00 A.M., then makes them a hot breakfast, treating them like family in her big house in the foothills of the Alps. And in Pennsylvania, Rita Vinokur is finishing her first shift with a feeling of deep satisfaction.
Here I’d like to point out one rather important fact. When our respectable Frau, who lives in a small Alpine village, decided to host refugees, she didn’t post notices along her secluded mountain road, nor did she send her ad to a local newspaper or to a rentals site. She posted her ad on social networks. And the Ukrainian family of five, who didn’t know any foreign languages, eventually figured out that they should ask the volunteer network Rubikus for help. And here is my conclusion—there must be a community where refugees and hosts can find one another. In other words, if you’re present on social networks, you have a greater chance of finding a job and a place to live. If you don’t use social media, but only watch TV, you’ll be living in a hostel or a former shopping center, receiving limited welfare assistance and eating aid agency food while waiting for this endless war to be over so you can go back to your destroyed home.
OTHER PEOPLE’S CUSTOMS
In the first days after the refugees Karina and Yuri have settled into their new place, Galina cooks for them. She makes double the amount of food, as if her long-lost children had come back to live with them. It feels strange. But to cook and eat only vegetarian dishes feels even more strange—and you wouldn’t cook two different dinners for the two families. In the beginning it was even interesting, but by the end of the first week, Galina is getting noticeably tired, while Karina still can’t bring herself to help. Yuri is almost never home. Following those unwritten rules for refugees, he’s rushing from one office to another, filling out papers, opening bank accounts, and trying to qualify for welfare assistance. It’s all good, but he doesn’t help with chores at home. And Karina and Yuri’s son follows Galina like a lost puppy, asking her to go with him to the basement, where—as Galina herself had told him—the toys left by Galina’s children are stored. Of course, it’s very touching, but the boy distracts Galina from her work, and even more, Galina’s no longer used to having a little boy around the house, a boy who seriously believes that the most important thing to do at this moment is to build a Lego tower.
Another issue is that Yuri and Karina are morning people, but Galina and Lutz are night owls. Galina makes dinner when Karina and Yuri can barely keep their eyes open, and their son is already asleep. And, for his part, the boy demands breakfast early in the morning, just a couple hours after Galina and Lutz have gone to bed.
It’s good that the apartment is rather spacious, so that these two families with different habits can avoid bothering each other too much. It’s also good that socially the families are similar: the Ukrainians work in the field of music and the Germans, in literature. It’s good that Karina finally got used to their new situation and has taken over some of the household chores, at least for her family. It’s good too that Yuri has qualified the family for welfare assistance and so has begun contributing to the budget. It’s good that the families like each other and have somehow found some common ground in their everyday routines. Other families of hosts and refugees don’t always manage to achieve that.
When Yuri and Karina are more settled, the pastor invites them to church with Galina and Lutz for a special service so the community will have a chance to meet them and collect charitable donations for their Ukrainian guests. In church, Yuri sings Italian arias and Ukrainian songs. The pastor gives a sermon. This is an unusual sermon, and the pastor delivers it with Yuri standing next to him. The pastor praises God for saving Karina and the little boy from bombing, for providing evacuation trains and buses to Romania, and for helping the Kovalchuk family reunite and find such wonderful hosts—Galina and Lutz. Yuri follows in his basic German and thanks god for having rescued his wife and son, for the evacuation trains, for reuniting the family, and for Galina and Lutz in Cologne. Meanwhile, Galina and Lutz sit in the fourth row and giggle. Over vegetarian dinners, Yuri had already tried to convert them to his religion, which is why they’re giggling now.
“Amen!” the pastor says.
“Hare Krishna,” Yuri repeats softly but with confidence. And here Lutz can’t hold back his laughter any longer.
After the service, some parishioners stop to chat with Lutz. They barely know one another because Lutz doesn’t believe in God and goes to church only on special occasions. These wealthy people live in big houses or apartments, and they want to ask Lutz how he managed to get himself refugees. They, too, would like to take refugees into their homes. They’ve written to government agencies, offering their hospitality, but have received no answers. Germany regularly pays money to refugees but can’t organize its citizens to help those same refugees. These parishioners from Cologne have never heard about the Rubikus or any other volunteer organizations. All they had to do was fill in a request on the Rubikus site and they could’ve had a hundred refugees.
After the service, Galina doesn’t go straight home—she needs to stop by the bank. There’s a line inside. A refugee from Ukraine can’t explain her problems to the clerk and can’t understand the solutions the clerk is offering. The child with Down syndrome that the woman has brought with her interrupts her attempts to communicate with signs. Galina becomes a translator, and the refugee woman thanks her. Galina is mad at the state for giving money while not thinking about how the refugees will fill in the necessary documents without knowing the language. Neither Galina, nor the refugee woman, nor the clerk know anything about Rubikus. They could’ve filled in a request, and Rubikus would have found a volunteer to go with that woman to the bank and another to babysit the child. Rubikus would’ve made it easier for everyone.
Rubikus volunteers, however, receive plenty of complaints from both sides—from the refugees they followed from the firing line and from the hosts whose altruism they admire so much. Some complaints are serious, in which case they have to relocate the refugees, but others are comical, based on cultural misunderstandings.
One German host, for instance, seriously complains about the woman staying at his place: He believes she is systematically humiliating and physically abusing her seven-year-old son. The German doesn’t understand her language but sees that every time the boy is getting ready for a walk, clumsily lacing his shoes while sitting on the floor, his mother yells at him, and as soon as the child reaches the door, she hits him on the head. The host tries to explain to his guest that such behavior is unacceptable, but she doesn’t know German. He even called the police, but when the officer came and tried to talk to the woman, all she could do was shake her head and say nicht verstehen.
The woman claims to love her son dearly, pampering and coddling him. She fled Kharkiv, and for the twelve days they spent travelling to Germany, she was “fussing over the child like an eagle over an eaglet.” And in regard to the screaming, the loving mother has never yelled at her darling son; it’s the way she normally talks. And a smack on the back of the kid’s head is purely symbolic—it helps to protect him from the evil eye. And as for the host, the woman is, of course, grateful, but in reality, he’s a bore and a rat. So, the Rubikus volunteer has to explain, first to the German, the magic power of the Ukrainian smack on the back of the head and then to the Ukrainian woman that it’s not customary in Europe to raise your voice or slap your child. Somehow the conflict is resolved.
But the next day brings a complaint from a Bavarian farmer. He hosted three refugee families and suggested they give him a hand and help a bit with the farm, so as not to be completely idle. Of course, if they had found a job, the farmer would never have asked them to take care of his potatoes and chickens, but all day long, they sit on the bench near the door and look at their phones. So, he tried to give them something to do, and what do you think? The women-refugees not only refused, but they also complained to the human rights feminist organizations, claiming they were being exploited and kept in slavery.
On another farm, the owner brought her guest some fresh milk from her cows for her child, but in response the refugee demanded lactose-free milk. Sorry, my cows don’t produce lactose-free milk. The following day brings a complaint from a refugee who received his welfare assistance, and the host suggested that he contribute something to cover the cost of water and electricity—How come, it’s my money, isn’t it? And on the third day, there’s a complaint from a refugee whose host asked how long he’s planning to stay and if he’s looking for a job and a place to live. What an asshole, first he invites us and then tries to kick us out.
When it comes to serious complaints, Spain holds first place. Many albergues, or hostels for pilgrims, that were transformed into refugee centers keep refugees locked up and feed them only rice and beans provided by the Red Cross. If someone wants to go to a city and look for a job, the staff threatens to not let them back in and to throw their belongings onto the street.
And of course, there were cases of fraud and sexual crime. I personally know of two cases when young women were invited to a comfortable house that turned out to be a brothel.
Nevertheless, it would be unfair to think that refugees have to deal with quarrels, scandals, and crimes all the time. I don’t know how I’d behave if there were a family of total strangers living in my house. The overwhelming majority of refugees and hosts are of course decent people. But we must understand that when a human wave of several million rolls over the relatively small territory of Europe, scandals and crimes are bound to occur, if only in accordance with the law of large numbers.
DISTRIBUTING FREEDOM
A total lack of trust toward the refugees is, however, the last thing we can afford. In the Romanian border town of Siret, right next to the checkpoint on the Ukrainian border, a young woman is standing and giving away cash to the refugees.
“Wait,” she says, stopping an old woman or a mother with a kid. “Take some money.”
“Me? I don’t need it.” This is typically the first reaction: People refuse to take the money.
“No-no, take it, please, you won’t owe us anything. And you don’t need to sign anything. We just want to help you. Please, take it and spend it any way you like. And go this way—there are volunteer tents with food, heat, and clothing.”
Siret is a mountain town. In winter, it’s very cold. The woman’s name is Natasha Dukach. She’s a violinist from Kharkiv, but for a long time she’s been living in the US. Her husband, Semyon Dukach, who emigrated from the Soviet Union, is now a successful entrepreneur investing in ambitious IT projects. Their friend Alex Furman is also a Soviet émigré and successful businessman who owns genetic laboratories in California. His wife Marina . . . To make a long story short, these four founded the charitable organization Cash for Refugees. Actually, they didn’t found the organization immediately; they began by traveling to the Ukrainian border to distribute their own money to refugees.
“Wait. Take this, please.” “Me? No, I don’t need it.”
Alex tells me he arrived in Romania with twenty thousand dollars of his own money. But while he’s been giving it away, about a hundred dollars per refugee in euros or Romanian leus, his friends have been transferring money into his account, totaling almost two hundred thousand additional dollars. And that’s how it all started. It usually takes them more time to distribute the money than to receive charitable contributions. A week later, Alex returned to the States and registered their organization, which at that moment already had one and a half million dollars in its account. Then big sponsors joined in, along with Hollywood stars.
