We had a wonderful weekend in Berlin. An extensive breakfast with Grosse Milchkaffees, eggs and hearty German bread, to an exhibition of inimitable conceptual art in two hangars of the former Tempelhof airport and stroll through the flea market in the Mauerpark. My daughters love second-hand clothes. Good for the planet and good for the wallet, an irresistible combination, especially if you wash the sweaters and pants well. In the evenings we ate hip pizzas with green cabbage, topinambur and charred onion and drank strange cloudy natural wine, about which we kept assuring each other that it tasted a lot better with dinner.
In the meantime, we occasionally received messages from Maria. She had just fled Kyiv with her mother, son, daughter, dog and cat. Her husband should have left them behind. She would make herself heard again when she crossed the border in Poland. Maria and her husband are the same age as us, their children the same age as ours. Until recently, they had an excellent life. You can see that when you check out her social media. Until a month ago there was nothing in the air. Photos of happy holidays, pleasant evenings with friends in a nice house and smiling faces on terraces. A few weeks ago, the cheerful images gave way to photos of plumes of smoke and broken houses, of destruction and war. Happy lives turned into nightmares. Now Maria and her family are refugees. It can turn that quickly.
I read a interview with football coach Darije Kalezic, who built up a successful life as a football player in the Netherlands. The war in Ukraine takes him back to his own childhood in Mostar, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Initially, his life was happy and carefree. Mostar was a popular holiday destination where hundreds of thousands of tourists came every year. In the 1990s the civil war broke out in Yugoslavia, after which everything turned around: ‘We saw how our city turned into hell every day. At the place where I used to play five-a-side football matches, I now had to step over the corpses. You go into survival mode from one moment to the next.’ The family ended up in an asylum seekers’ center in the Netherlands: ‘Suddenly you are no longer that dentist, that talented football player or that surgeon who has already saved thousands of lives. You are that refugee. That is very confronting.’
Maria is now safe in Poland. In the coming days she will drive on to the Netherlands. Her old existence is gone. She is also a refugee and she also finds this painful. A war you didn’t ask for can wipe out everything you have and everything you dreamed of. As easy as the snap of a finger. I already knew it, but still: this could have been us, this could be us. Life is cruel and unfair. Through organizations like Host4Ukraine† TakecareBnB and of course Vrefugee work in the Netherlands can we help Ukrainian and other refugees. Ultimately it is as simple as Darije Kalezic says: ‘One is lucky that his cradle was in the Netherlands and the other is unlucky that he has to flee Yugoslavia, Syria or Ukraine. But essentially we all strive for the same thing: to be happy in life.’