When we were on the bus from Uzhgorod to Dachau, fleeing Ukraine, one of the volunteers asked if we all wanted to start a Telegram group. I volunteered and created the group for our little community of destiny. When we finally arrived in Dachau, however, many of the other passengers from my bus spread out to all sorts of countries and to relatives. In the meantime, Ukrainian volunteers who had been living in Dachau for some time set up their own group for newcomers in the area around Dachau. At first this group only existed on Whatsapp because that’s more popular for chatting in Germany, but soon the whole group moved to Telegram. If you want to become a member, you simply receive the link. In the beginning there were maybe 70 people from Ukraine in this Telegram chat. In the meantime it has become a really big community with 700 members, which bears the name “Ukrainer: Dachau und Kreis” in Ukrainian.
What is this group for? First of all, for better communication and help for the refugees. We didn’t know anything about Germany and those Ukrainians who had lived here for ten or 20 years helped us to find our way around. The members asked all sorts of questions about life in Germany. From “Where can I buy buckwheat?” to “How do I apply for an integration course?”. A huge topic is always communication with the job center and the question of how to find your own apartment. Usually five to ten messages come in a day, sometimes 200 – depending on how much information someone needs at the time. Seven administrators maintain the group and they have also created a very useful document collecting all the information. Someone posted spam two or three times, which was then immediately deleted.
When the 9 euro ticket expired, things got complicated
With the support of the group, most of them have filled out their forms at the job center. I found that quite complicated. But then September came and the 9-euro ticket expired – and suddenly we all had to deal with the fare zones in local public transport. Then it got really tiring.
It’s really helpful then to have that chat with the others. Only sometimes there are discussions – as is probably always the case at some point when a group gets this big. There are always arguments about who speaks which language at home or in public – Russian or Ukrainian. Once a woman asked the group how to get the free food from the Dachauer Tafel. Some understood that immediately because they could understand that money had been really tight lately. Others were surprised and asked why the person could not get enough, the state support must be enough to live on. These people knew nothing about the background of the questioner.
I would not speak of a kind of filter bubble among the Ukrainians in the Dachau district in this group. But it is helpful to be in contact with each other. After six months of writing back and forth on Telegram, we’re starting to know each other. And some people even recognize each other on the street now.