Emiliia Dieniezhna planted lettuce and pulled weeds in her host’s garden.
(Photo: Karin Kampwerth/oh)
“Am I allowed to laugh, at least smile?” Emiliia Dieniezhna asks herself this question every day. When she sees her four-year-old daughter Ewa cheering on her bike. When she looks at the sprouting lettuce in the garden. Or when she looks down on the Isar from the terrace of a Pullach tavern on a beautiful summer’s day. You could enjoy life there. But when she then calls her husband in Kyiv that evening, who is sitting in the dark because the Ukrainian capital is far from safe, all trace of cheerfulness disappears. Russian missiles hit there. Turning on the light offers a target.
Emiliia Dieniezhna has been living in Pullach with her little daughter, her mother and her aunt for four months. The women with the child were on the road from Kyiv for 50 hours. Just get out of Ukraine. The city was bombed daily at the beginning of the Russian war of aggression. While most of the refugees had no idea where they would end up, it was clear to Dieniezhna that they should go to Munich.
A year and a half ago she spent several months in the Bavarian capital. Her husband had a brain tumor. Dieniezhna learned from an acquaintance with whom she studied in Brussels that the 43-year-old had the best chance of recovery with an operation at the Klinikum Rechts der Isar. This university friend also helped now and established contact with a family who lives in Switzerland but owns a terraced house in Pullach and made it available to Dieniezhna.
The 34-year-old feels great gratitude that her family was spared disorientation and collective accommodation. Since her arrival in Munich and Pullach, she has met so many people who have met her with great willingness to help. There was a woman who put a vegetable box in front of her front door. Or another who gave her a bike trailer for free. And the man who drove her to a meeting with a friend in Ebersberg at the weekend, because Emiliia Dieniezhna initially didn’t trust herself to make the journey from Pullach to the other end of Munich with the S-Bahn, including changing trains. Or now her neighbor Roland, who taught her a lot about gardening and that’s why the lettuce grows behind the terraced house. These are reasons for which she allows herself a smile. But enjoying life? “That’s not a solution for me,” says the 34-year-old. The news from home makes them too sad. “I can’t ignore the war.”
The terraced house in Pullach is furnished in a rustic Bavarian style. Emiliia Dieniezhna likes this a lot.
(Photo: Karin Kampwerth/oh)
She traces the fact that she follows all the atrocities in her country closely to her job. Emiliia Dieniezhna is a journalist. She worked for various TV stations in the Ukraine and, many years ago, completed an internship at Deutsche Welle in Bonn. She speaks German very well, is a trained translator and language teacher, in addition to German also for Russian and English. Before she fled, she worked as a communications manager for the anti-corruption organization Transparency International Ukraine employed. While she hears from many refugee compatriots that they read as little news as possible in order not to despair, Dieniezhna’s thoughts revolve around how she can support her country from Germany.
She has already found an answer. After initially translating for refugees at the Anchor Center in Munich, the 34-year-old now teaches German to Ukrainian children and young people in the welcome class at the Gymnasium in Pullach. “That doesn’t help to stop the war,” says Dieniezhna, “but it does help our children here.”
She will write for the SZ about how the war in Ukraine feels from Pullach
She will have a second answer starting next week with a regular column in the Süddeutsche Zeitung give. “I want to bring my country closer to the Germans,” she explains. Because what she found in the talks was the realization “that the war is very close for Ukrainian refugees, but far away for the Germans”. Dieniezhna also sees this as a reason for different opinions, for example about a hesitant federal government on the question of supplying heavy weapons or the effectiveness of sanctions against Russia.
Dieniezhna also wants to prevent misunderstandings with her texts. “Of course I understand Germans’ concerns about rising energy prices,” she says. But Russian propaganda should not take hold and blame Ukraine. “Responsible for this is Russia alone.” But she also wants to stimulate debate. For example, whether there is really security in Munich, in Bavaria, in Germany. “Who knows who else this man will attack,” Dieniezhna says of Vladimir Putin.
The 34-year-old sees her work as a journalist, her commitment as a German teacher and her work as a translator not only in practical terms, but also in philosophical terms. “This is my investment in peace. How we act now affects how we treat our children.” That is the responsibility you have to face throughout your life.
Dieniezhna got to know as a young woman that this is a very German topic. She was 19 years old when she visited Kiel for a student exchange. There she visited many museums, studied German history and heard the word “guilt” for the first time. At that time she could not do much with it. Now she knows: “If I don’t do anything, I’ll have to ask myself later how it makes me feel.”
Emiliia Dieniezhna is convinced that many of the people she has met in Munich and Pullach will be able to answer that positively one day. This applies to those who provide humanitarian aid for their country as well as to support for the refugees here, no matter how different it may be. Her neighbor Roland, for example, not only explained German bureaucracy to her, but also taught her how to plant vegetables, pull weeds and mow the lawn. The garden of the Pullach terraced house now looks tiptop. Emiliia Dieniezhna is proud of it, only now she has a big blister on her hand from the unfamiliar work. Then she has to laugh about it.