I recently heard Naliia, a young Ukrainian, describe it as “difficult last month”. ‘I lost my hair, I lost my home; The village where I spent my childhood was completely destroyed,” he wrote in the secretariat of the Invaded podcast.
You can see it on your screens, hear and read vivid stories, but the extent of this humanitarian situation is still difficult to grasp: more than five million people, mostly women and children, fled in Europe for two months, millions of them fled. more were destroyed internally.
The 1938 novel De Passagier, rediscovered by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, captures terribly the need to quickly leave one’s home and life behind.
The most desperate thing is that the Jewish hero, Berlin businessman Otto Silbermann, left Nazi Germany too late. The novel was rewritten as a John Buchan thriller by Franz Kafka. After Kristallnacht, Silbermann crosses Germany, but has nowhere to take refuge; His hometown became a prison.
British author Patricia Nicol has selected some of the best refugee books, including Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s rediscovered 1938 novel The Passenger and Marina Lewycka’s A Brief History of Tractors in Ukraine.
Tomas and Tereza, the lead couple in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, manage to flee their homeland after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. But being safe in exile in Zurich, Switzerland, they feel restless and uprooted. The urge to return home is irresistible.
Marina Lewycka’s A Brief History of Tractors in Ukraine, although a funny novel, explores how the trauma of exile and migration can resonate across generations.
In modern Britain, two separate sisters, Vera and Nadia, join in on Nikolai’s dislike for his new wife, who is much younger than his widowed father, Valentina. Nikolai came to England as a refugee after the Second World War. Valentina is part of a post-Soviet exodus.
I chose books that describe Europe’s experience of fleeing war and seeking refuge.
There are others, such as the Kite Runner, the Aleppo Beekeeper, and East West Street, who vividly describe the dangerous lives led by migrants fleeing the war. And remind us to show compassion.
Source: Daily Mail
