I miss many things in my everyday life in Germany that were once important to me in Ukraine. These are sometimes banal objects like clothing, but if you don’t have your favorite sweater with you for a long time, sometimes a piece of home is missing. When it became clear to me that I would not be here in Dachau for three or four months, as initially assumed, but for a much longer time, I had to find a solution.
In December I decided to use a courier service. I asked my father, who, like almost all men, stayed in Ukraine, to pack a package for me in Kiev. He was then to send it to a courier in western Ukraine, who would take it to Dachau in a mini-bus. I had been recommended this courier in a local Telegram group, this man brings packages from Ukraine to the Dachau Hotel Amedia, where I now live, every Saturday. Why didn’t I just ask my dad to mail a package? Because I find it very difficult to really trust delivery services or the state postal service, especially in times of war.
Finding the pale lilac sparkly blouse overwhelmed my father
My father lives in the Kiev region, so he had to drive all the way into the city to get to the apartment where my mother – his ex-wife – and I lived before the war broke out. When he opened the door, it was almost as cold inside the apartment as it was outside. Nobody had been there for months, he first unplugged all household appliances because they can be dangerous due to the constant power outages.
He gave away whatever frozen food he could find. The apartment also had no lights without electricity, so I had to use a Telegram video connection to guide my father to my closet in his ex-wife’s apartment in the sparse daylight that filtered through the windows. That was a little funny. He had to rummage through all my clothes until he found what I was looking for: warm jackets, pants, sweaters. However, he was completely overwhelmed with a color description: I was looking for my pale lilac-colored blouse, which glittered slightly.
I also asked my father to pack a black bag for me, in which I now carry my teaching materials for the German course in Dachau. In addition, at my request, he packed buckwheat, Ukrainian sweets and medicines. When the package arrived at my hotel a week later, I was very touched: He had also enclosed a surprise for my birthday, a bracelet and a ring from the middle of the war. No matter how many kilometers there are between me and my father – he had found a way to show me that he was thinking of me.