Last week my class created a Ukraine exhibition at our school on Elisabeth-Kohn-Straße. There I teach Ukrainian children German and English. The idea for the exhibition came about after a conversation with the social worker at our school. The school then organized a nationality week. Every class and every student should prepare something to represent their country and its culture. There are many people in my class who can paint very well, so we decided to paint pictures about Ukraine – and express our feelings with these pictures.
I haven’t painted anything myself because unfortunately I have no talent at all. But my students even more so, so in the end I would have preferred to buy a few of the works myself. At the beginning we decided not to allow any overly dark motifs. Because some students initially wanted to paint about war and death. Our target group is our peers, and I think they’ve heard enough about it by now. Above all, we wanted to tell German children a little more about Ukraine.
The children’s main topics were the national colors of Ukrainians, yellow and blue. These are the colors of our flag, symbolizing the sky and the ears of wheat. Ukraine is a country with very developed and widespread agriculture, and the wheat field is an important symbol for us. Two girls painted pictures of Ukrainian women in our national costume, Vyshyvanka, standing in, that’s right, a field.
Woman in the Vyshyvanka national costume in a poppy field at night.
(Photo: Emiliia Dieniezhna)
Many painted poppies. They are also very common in Ukraine and give me and my students a feeling of home. Student Daria painted the poppies in the shape of Ukraine’s borders, Karyna and Sonja placed a Ukrainian woman in a poppy field at night.
Poppies in the outlines of Ukraine.
(Photo: Emiliia Dieniezhna)
Some pictures bring very happy feelings, but others also bring sad ones, such as the picture of the woman in the poppy field. The young artists can’t always describe their feelings clearly, but sometimes they said: “I’m sad and the picture is sad.” Another rather dark picture is called “The Man in the Clouds”, which was painted by Varvara and Maria. The man also stands in a wheat field and looks for the way at night. And at the same time he is looking for his home because he lost his house in the war.
Man in the wheat field at night.
(Photo: Emiliia Dieniezhna)
I really liked the picture about my city, which is called Kyiv and was painted by the student Lada. She painted the monument to the history of Kyiv. This shows three brothers, Kyj, Shchek and Khoryw, and their sister Lybid, who are considered the founders of Kyiv.
We all exhibited the pictures at school, and that’s where they stay for the time being. Many classmates looked at the pictures, asked questions and discussed them with us. This is school diplomacy at its best, direct and creative.
Emiliia Dieniezhna, 35, fled from Kiev with her then four-year-old daughter Ewa Pullach near Munich. She works on a voluntary basis for the non-governmental organization NAKO, whose goal is to fight corruption in Ukraine. She also teaches German to Ukrainian refugee children. She writes a weekly column for the SZ about her view of events in her home country from Munich.