Displaced, page 9
“What are we going to do when the IRS comes, and we’ll have to file reports on all this money?” Alex kept asking Semyon.
“Well, they’ll have to believe that we’ve given away all the money to refugees, or we’ll have to pay taxes from our own money,” Semyon answered. “We can afford it, can’t we?”
When they could no longer give away the money all by themselves, they recruited volunteers. Every morning the volunteers would receive thick packets of money from Natasha, Alex, or Marina and spend the whole day distributing that money, trying to spot the old, the sick, and women with infants, and by evening they would bring back a report that no tax inspector would ever accept—a list with check marks; every check mark indicated a person who had received a modest cash donation.
At first, the Romanian police, fire fighters, soldiers, and the priest from the local church thought the Cash for Refugees volunteers were crooks, but they soon realized that they were just insane and so they began helping them—allowing them to stay right next to the border checkpoint and introducing them to the local authorities.
When the flow of refugees through Siret decreased and it became clear that most refugees wouldn’t cross the border but would remain in Chernovtsy, housed in churches and gyms, the Cash for Refugee group moved to Chernovtsy. They set up an office, organized a data base, and began to give away money through the bank—by transferring around one hundred dollars onto the refugees’ assistance cards. They calculated that to provide a one-time donation to two hundred thousand refugees would cost fifteen million dollars, and this was an achievable goal—they could raise that kind of money. Alex thought the Cash for Refugees would last a month or two, until big international organizations entered the scene. Now it seems that even the founders can’t easily close their successful charity, which had been organized by chance. The donors were demanding that it continue. People like it when refugees receive not blankets or hot soup, but money.
“Because this way,” Alex says, “we give them a bit of freedom. Yes, they are fed and dressed, but before February 24, they could not only have food and clothes—they could also decide if they should buy a cellphone charger or badminton rackets. They used to be as free as I am. Now, with this money, we’re giving them back a little bit of freedom, and this is hard to stop. If there’s famine in Africa, we’ll go there too and distribute money—in other words, freedom, not just bread.”
THE LIMITS OF ALTRUISM
It’s possible Alex is wrong. To tell the truth, it’s impossible to be self-sacrificing for a long period of time. On the seventh day of her volunteer job at Medyka, Vika Lagodinskaya walks through the humanitarian center and runs into the very same woman who a day before couldn’t let go of her daughter’s hand, even for the time it took to go to the bathroom. Now the mother and daughter are walking next to each other; they’re no longer holding hands. The woman recognizes Vika and hugs her. At this moment, Vika suddenly realizes she’s dead tired and just can’t deal with the refugees any longer. She can’t translate their documents, listen to their tragic stories, or even be happy about their good news. Thank God, tomorrow her shift will be over. How right were the Israeli psychologists when they decided to invite volunteers for no more than a week—in a week’s time, a volunteer burns out.
Evgeny Pinelis has been working in Przemyśl for ten days. He’s completely happy, feels like he’s in the right place, and—a true indicator of psychological balance—doesn’t even browse through the news or listen every night to the Ukrainian president’s adviser Oleksiy Arestovych. But on the tenth day Evgeny feels as if a light bulb has been turned off inside of him. The vacation he decided to use volunteering is almost over, and Evgeny is glad to go back home to New York to work as a critical care doctor—apparently, it’s much easier than working as a paramedic in a refugee camp.
Olga Sokolova is sleeping. She’s been sleeping for twenty-three hours straight, almost an entire day. In Moscow, Olga runs a successful wine business. She’s a smart, modern, and fashionable woman who loves traveling. But now she feels ashamed to travel through Europe when in the East her countrymen are traveling in tanks or on evacuation trains.
Olga says she’s like a cat: She needs freedom of movement. She says, “I might not go anywhere, but the door must be open.” Since the COVID pandemic, Olga has packed an “emergency travel bag,” containing a bank card issued in Malta (which became very handy after February 24), two foreign passports, some cash in dollars and euros, three Pfizer vaccination certificates—these days, that’s what sets a person free.
Since the beginning of the war, Olga feels strange when she watches the news: historic events are occurring, but she isn’t a part of them. But she should be. She must witness with her own eyes the people whose cities and lives we’ve destroyed. She needs to know how much they hate us now. With these thoughts weighing on her, Olga is searching for airplane tickets to Berlin to work for a week or so at the Central railway station as a volunteer and translator for refugees. That’s how successful businesspeople spend their vacations these days.
There are no direct flights from Russia to Berlin anymore. To fly through Istanbul costs a thousand euros, through Abu Dhabi—three thousand, so Olga flies to Minsk, takes a bus to Vilnius, and from Vilnius flies to Berlin. Friends meet her in every city. As I’ve been saying, in order to live a more or less normal life under conditions of war and be in a position to help others, you, too, must constantly receive help from people with whom you are virtual friends on social networks.
At the Berlin Central Station, Olga goes through an orientation and learns what opportunities exist for refugees and where to find them; she then receives a volunteer uniform vest with a yellow chevron—indicating that she knows Russian. In addition, she attaches a sticker on her vest informing everyone that the person with this sticker knows both Russian and English.
Outfitted in this way, Olga walks back and forth through the station. From time to time, other volunteers ask her to translate something for them. Occasionally, she sees a group of teenagers, approaches them (as per her instructions), inquires about their parents, and then asks them to call their mothers to make sure they’re not lost or runaways. Olga chats for a while with these teenagers, and they talk about the war. The thing that scares these teens the most is that President Zelenskyy might stop the war before total victory and make peace in exchange for territory. “No,” the teenagers say, “we need to bring this war to an end, free all Ukrainian land, including the Donbas and Crimea.” But, despite all that, they don’t hate Russians. Olga is Russian, and she doesn’t hide the fact that she’s from Moscow. “So what?” the teenagers say. “We hate only those who attacked us.”
It sometimes happens that, after a train has arrived and the crowd of passengers has subsided, a couple of elderly unattended people are left sitting on their suitcases on the platform.
“Hello, are you refugees?” Olga approaches them.
“Yes.”
“But why are you sitting here?”
“We don’t know where to go.”
Olga grabs their suitcases and drags them to the escalator, gets them tickets to Dusseldorf, which, as it happens, was their destination; it’s where their daughter lives. Then she explains to the old couple that it’s better to take the direct train in the morning than to travel now with two layovers—you’ll arrive faster on a direct train. Then she arranges their overnight stay.
“Here in Germany, you Russians are so kind,” the old couple says. “Why are you so angry in Moscow?”
“I’m a Russian from Moscow,” Olga states, not hiding the fact.
“Why did you do this to us?” the old woman says through her tears, and the women hug each other.
Olga has endured such volunteer walks through the railway station for three days. After that she moves out of her friend’s place where she’s been staying in Berlin, gets a hotel room, and goes to bed. She sleeps for almost an entire day. The human capacity for active altruism and empathy is limited.
CHAPTER 5
Rubikus and Others
“The elimination of over one hundred nationalists and mercenaries from Western countries as the result of a high precision air strike by Iskander operational-tactical rockets on the defense headquarters of the City of Kharkhov has been confirmed. Russia continues to fulfill the humanitarian responsibilities it has assumed to save and protect civilians. Despite all the difficulties and obstacles created by Kiev over the past several days, without the participation of either the Ukrainian authorities or the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 14168 individuals, including 891 children, have been evacuated from danger zones in Ukraine to Russia.” Official Telegram Channel of the Russian Ministry of Defense, March 25, 2022.
THE CHATROOM
“I have a request from two elderly people in Chernigov. They don’t want to go by boat. Are there any other options?” Since February 25, 2022, Svetlana Vodolazskaya has begun every day with this or some similar message. She wakes up, checks her chatroom, and sees . . . “No, there’s nothing else available in Chernigov, only a boat.”
It was by mere chance that Svetlana started her volunteer group within the Rubikus community—which the organizers and participants of the Hamelin music festival had been using to stay in touch. She saw a request to help some refugees—to find an evacuation train, figure out where to go, arrange for someone to meet them . . . First, she began by giving advice, then got more deeply involved, and brought in her friends.
“Free flights to the UK—are you sure it’s not a scam? Do they need to pay for their luggage?”
“To begin with, why are they going to the UK? Look, it’s written in every booklet that it’s very hard to live in the UK without money.”
Actually, Svetlana is a tutor—she helps children with math. When Russia annexed Crimea, Svetlana and her husband left the country. Her husband is a computer programmer and easily found a job in London. Even before moving to London, Svetlana used to teach online, but now her school is truly international—children from all over the world sign up for her classes. And on top of that, she organizes a summer math camp in Austria, as well as a festival in Hamelin, Germany, which offers music lessons, classes on various academic subjects, workshops on various crafts, and conversation and reading practice in Russian.
“Listen, what do we have in Bulgaria? My request is at a hotel right on the Golden Sands Beach, but they feed them very poorly. According to the mother, her kid is literally starving. For lunch they got two chicken wings, and for dinner some bean salad. She’s asking for a slow cooker, to feed her child.” “I found a store in Varna where they’ll sell a slow cooker at a discount. And here’s what they write from Varna: It’s true, the food is bad. The state subsidy is only twenty euros a day, and many hotels haven’t received any money yet.”
There are thirty-five teachers working at the online school Svetlana organized. They formed the initial backbone of Rubikus. Very soon, more people joined, mostly parents who had taken their kids to the Hamelin festival or to the math camp in Austria. In a few days, seventy-eighty people had joined from the States, the UK, Germany, Poland, and Russia. Thanks to the geographic distribution of the volunteers in different time zones, Rubikus is able to work non-stop, without any breaks for sleep.
“Welcome, Diana. This chat was created for those who are willing to help our team with the evacuation of refugees from Ukraine to Europe. To receive access to our database, please fill out this form . . . ”
Svetlana often conducts interviews with new Rubikus volunteers. She usually asks where the volunteer is physically located, how much time they can devote, how much stress they can withstand, and so on. Svetlana used to think that volunteer efforts to evacuate refugees would be necessary only in the first days, maybe the first weeks, of the war. Then the “grownups” would step in—the Red Cross, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and government agencies in the countries bordering Ukraine would arrive and rescue everyone. But “the grownups” haven’t showed up or they arrived many months later, and when they finally arrived, they asked Rubikus for help. Meanwhile, the Rubikus network continues to grow, and the work of its volunteers is still in high demand.
“Is it true that in Switzerland, it costs 850 franks to call an ambulance? Why is everything so expensive there? Or is there a way to get it for free for the refugees?”
“My request received visas for adults, but not for the children. She just forgot to apply for kids’ visas. Now they’re sitting and waiting.”
In the slang of the Rubikus volunteers, a request refers to a person or a family.
“In Przemyśl, a very good guy’s done everything from Dnipro—he met my request and put them on the bus.”
Translated from the volunteer slang into normal language, this statement from the chat means that there’s a new Rubikus volunteer in Przemyśl who’s been effective in organizing transportation for a refugee or a refugee family from the city of Dnipro to the Polish border. The volunteer met the family and sent them to their final destination. Incidentally, the word “request” can also be used literally, as in a request for help.
“There are volunteers in Warsaw who can help with tickets within Europe. They used to send people to Canada and Mexico too, but not anymore. For that, you have to come in person, file a request, then wait for a couple of days. Some Polish fund finances this.”
At the beginning of the war, Rubikus dealt mostly with streams of refugees coming from Poland and Romania. By May, most people were arriving through Narva and Tallinn, coming from the Russian side. They were refugees from Mariupol, Rubizhne, Popasna, and Kharkiv—those who had wanted to evacuate to the West but were forced to evacuate to the East.
Very soon there were volunteers in Russia who were prepared to collect money and buy tickets to Europe for people in the Russian refugee centers. And again, no “grownups” stepped forward to cover those expenses—not the Red Cross, nor the UNHCR—only volunteers.
As far as Svetlana knows, no one from the “grownups”—the Ministry of Education or the Children Rights Commissioners—have given any thought to how refugee children will study without knowing the language of the country that accepted them.
“Two of my families got accepted into Finland. Of course, it’s crazy cold over there LOL, and there’s the language that no one understands, but they welcomed them as family. And right away they went to live with their host families.”
Svetlana proposes that the next big initiative for Rubikus is to organize schools where refugee children can study. In addition, Svetlana is planning to finish designing the Rubikus website so that it can gather in one place information about all the stipends and social programs offered to refugees by universities from around the world. Svetlana believes that young adults are in an especially difficult situation. Little children will learn the language and assimilate, but teenagers without the language won’t be able to continue their education, not this year or the next. So, Svetlana’s school is primarily for them. During the first months of the war, Svetlana realized that “the grownups” weren’t going to show up, weren’t going to rescue anybody, and weren’t going to fix anything. We’re “the grownups” now.
ORGANIZING THE PROCESS
“I’m ready to do GoForma for Pampers in Bulgaria.”
“What are you ready to do?”
“LOL! Gofundme, not GoForma. Sorry.”
To be honest, in the beginning the messages in the Rubikus chatroom, where I was added in the first days of the war, looked like a barely comprehensible hodgepodge of information. And even if someone shared some useful information with their colleagues, it was impossible to find it the next day under the avalanche of new cases, questions, and random volunteer conversations.
“I have a request. A battery and power supply specialist is looking for a job. What country is best for him?”
“There’s a refugee support program in Andorra. They’re offering a job in the alternative energy field, the salary is 1100 euro a month, free travel to Spain, free housing until the first paycheck, medical insurance, and kindergartens, schools, and language courses for the children.”
All these messages were landing in the same chatroom until Rita Vinokur joined Rubikus and decided to organize things.
Rita is a native Muscovite but has been living in Minsk since getting married. Her husband, of course, is a computer programmer (no, not all Rubikus volunteers are computer programmers; there are also musicians, educators, wives of computer programmers, and owners of small IT companies). After the 2020 Minsk protests, they decided to leave Belarus. As Rita puts it, “We wanted to live in accordance with our conscience and to live in safety at the same time.” They easily found jobs in Pennsylvania and moved to a small town where squirrels run across the roofs, and the main reason for driving slowly is to avoid hitting a deer crossing the road. But as soon as they settled down, the war started. The first week, Rita was beside herself with shock and worry. (How well I understand her—I, too, was going nuts until I began collecting the material for this book.) But in week two, on social media, she found the volunteer group Rubikus and offered Svetlana Vodolazskaya her help.
The first thing Rita set about doing was to build a database. Now, for example, the announcement that the city Andorra in the Spanish province of Teruel is offering refugees jobs in the alternative energy field won’t get lost in the endless flow of volunteer chats, but will be carefully placed in a designated cell of a Google table, and this information can easily be retrieved by searching under “job,” “energy,” or “Andorra.” In addition to information about jobs, guidelines for filling out paperwork, and rules for crossing borders, the database contains extensive, constantly expanding lists of hosts, drivers, and refugees—those who are now traveling with logistical support from Rubikus and those whom Rubikus evacuated from Ukraine and helped relocate in Europe. In April of 2022, there were two thousand families settled in Europe.
