How does it feel to be ripped out of the old life into a new world because of war? A comrade reports.
Reliving the war. Day 280.
Every day of our non-war routine we make many decisions that create a sense of control over our lives. This fragile privilege helps us plan for the future, bringing back the importance of our own decisions again and again. War deprives us of this opportunity.
Many refugees, not only Ukrainians, find themselves in a completely new environment and lose their sense of subjectivity. Apathy, numbness, derealization -- you feel trapped between reality and the imaginary world. The bureaucratic struggle for the right to be in a non-war country becomes your new job. The Jobcenter acquires the caricatured features of the German order. This order sort of exists by itself, you have no influence on anything. Your papers can simply get lost and then you start the procedure all over again. What's your hurry?
You're afraid of making a wrong move in this ivory tower and losing part of your allowance, which is enough just to choose between white and multigrain bread. Buying both is already a luxury.
You try to get out of the refugee camp because the collective trauma in the narrow, poorly ventilated corridors only gets deeper and darker. Your therapist, if you are lucky enough to find one in Germany, asks what helps you regain a sense of security. In this particular moment of security, your belly should kind of fill with warmth.
TE-TE-ROW. A small town in Mecklenburg, home to a shelter for Ukrainian refugees. A river with a similar name, Teteriv, is in Ukraine, in the region of Zhytomyr. It flows through narrow valleys with steep slopes and flows into the Kyiv water reservoir. Just combination of these letters makes you feel a bit calmer and not so scared.
Every time you repeat to yourself that you are safe, you meet the poor Germans of Teterov, who are very afraid of freezing this winter. Every week they come demonstrating their despair infront of the windows of the shelter. They are chanting that Teterov belongs to the Germans, and you have to go back to a place where the basic modus is survival. Perhaps they just don't know what it's like to drain the water from the radiator to divide it among the children sitting in the basement of a house that will very soon be destroyed by the Russian army. Or how it is to see tank gung aimed at you, which very soon will shoot into your house.
These are just a few of the war reliving we share with the people who find themselves on our farm fleeing the war. We help them regain a sense of home and security. We walk with them this thorny path through Jobcentre, Ausländerbehörde and other Kafka's rudiments. We cannot heal their traumas, but we can share this difficult experience with them. And we will not let the right wing take over the public space of small towns by spreading toxic ideas in Mecklenburg.
If you want to take part of concrete solidarity action with refugee in Mecklenburg lets meet together in Teterow.
Movie-night: « The Landscape of fear »
09. Dezembre 2022, 7 p.m.
Raum der Begegnung, Teterow, Rostocker Str. 2
We will organise cinema evening and reflect together on the topic of migration in armed conflict.
This land belongs to empathy, humanity and solidarity!