Germany is a “temporary homeland” for the Ukrainians after the Syrians

A convoy of refugees and a convoy of bags. How difficult it is for you not to have anything left of your country but a bag. The sight of the bags breaks my heart.

As if the bag was a coffin carrying the body of the homeland and the smell of dirt and ashes of memories. This was the scene that Asharq Al-Awsat monitored at the central train station in Berlin, the German bosom where refugees meet with refugees. On the Ukrainian flight, there are no death boats. Trains are a means of escape. They distanced themselves from the Russian missiles and bombs, but they do not know how long the absence will be and what the days of exile will hide. Sophie, a young woman of twenty-one. She came from the city of Kherson on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine.

At first, she did not believe that the war would break out and prolong, and said that she doubted the possibility of a return soon “because it is impossible to live under the Russian occupation.” Syrian character.

Syrians go to this neighborhood for shopping. Ehab Sahari came from Idlib in a “sort of asylum.” He says, “The shop was Turkish, and it became ours, me and my brother.” “I sympathize with the Ukrainians; We have tasted the bitterness of losing one’s country and destroying it. When we said that Russian aviation destroyed our country, no one wanted to listen.”

In the first years of their arrival in the country of asylum, the arrivals are stubborn, trying to preserve their heritage. Tradition becomes the last bridge that connects them to their former country. But time changes everything. Tomorrow their children go to school, learn another language, save the finances of the new country, and engage in a different way of life. This is true of the Syrians, and it will later be true of the Ukrainians.
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