There is hardly an experience that I have waited for more than the end of the war: my daughter Ewa starting school. The time had come on Tuesday. Of course, our family prepared for this, because the first day of school is just as important an event here as it is in my home country.
In Ukraine, school always starts on September 1st. To celebrate the day, I always wore a black and white dress and two large white hair bows. That would now be impossible because this clothing symbolizes not only the military, but also the cultural Soviet occupation of that time. Ukrainian children have long been wearing our national costume, Vyshyvanka.
My daughter will wear a nice dress because her first day of school is here in Germany. Of course she also has a school bag. We absolutely had to make them ourselves, German friends made that clear to us. Many people do this in kindergarten. Unfortunately, there was no such offer in Ewa’s kindergarten, so we had to do it ourselves. I can tell you here: it wasn’t easy for us because this tradition doesn’t exist in my home country.
I ordered the bag cut online and then glued it together. My daughter helped me glue a beautiful mermaid onto the bag. My husband made the fin and glued it on. However, he discovered that I had glued the blank incorrectly. The need was great because we didn’t want to make a new school cone because we had already put so much work and time into it.
Emiliia Dieniezhna’s daughter’s school cone may not be perfect, but it is beautifully decorated with a mermaid.
(Photo: Emiliia Dieniezhna/oh)
Of course it would be easier to buy a ready-made school cone. But I’m now very happy that my daughter goes to school with a less than perfect bag. My husband jokes that school cones can only look professional if the school child’s parents are teachers or engineers.
I consider it a real luxury that we were able to talk about fun things like the quality of a school cone. My daughter goes to school in a country where there is no war, where education and socialization are guaranteed. This cannot be valued highly enough. But that’s precisely why I can’t ignore the start of school for the children in my home country.
I suffer because there are always air alarms during classes. I suffer because many children don’t have the opportunity to go to school because the schools – like in Odessa – don’t have bunkers where teachers and children can go to safety. I suffer because many children have online classes, which harms education and socialization. I suffer because the children in my hometown in Donbass go to the occupied Russian school and have to learn Russian as their mother tongue.
I know that I personally can do little about all of these injustices. It is all the more important that people do not forget this war, even if it sometimes seems very far away.
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.