From Munich station’s 35 platforms you can go anywhere in the world and I knew I would find them there. I had not expected their animals. When the bombs you never believed you would hear start falling, what do you grab, of all the things you own? The cats and the dogs, of course. A great pet migration is underway. There were cats in boxes and cat carriers and hold-alls. As I interviewed their owners, dogs under the tables nudged my feet and sniffed my legs.
It is true that at British airports signs, in English and Ukrainian, offer information. But Britain barely figures on the refugee trail. We send weapons to Ukraine, and donors give money, but as yet, for shameful political reasons, the British people have been mostly unable to help the people of Ukraine. Germany, a state shaped by Angela Merkel, one of the few leaders of her generation who was both capable and decent, has helped hundreds of thousands. And there they were, women and children and old men and pets, in an old dim waiting room in Munich, where a Catholic charity was giving out food and coffee and tea.
Cristina comes from paradise: Odessa was paradise, she said. Truly, paradise. She worked in cosmetics and says her life was “perfect” before the war. “When the bombs started I called my friend and I said, ‘Am I crazy? I know I don’t follow the news but have we got Nazis? Where are the Nazis?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s the Russians, it’s Russian propaganda.’”
Cristina speaks six languages. A few weeks ago, when she first arrived in Munich — via Romania, Hungary and Austria — she translated between other refugees and the German authorities for 48 hours non-stop. She helped about 800 people, awed German officials told her afterwards. With her pencilled-on eyebrows, piercings and air of mighty charisma, Cristina struck me as a kind of punk angel. She is most proud of engineering a family’s escape from Mariupol as it was encircled and devastated by the Russian army.
She is a fair distance from paradise now, sitting in the spring sun on the steps outside the old waiting room, but at least she is safe. “The Germans are strict but they are really good,” Cristian says, chain smoking. “If you can complete six stages, all the forms, you can get a house or a room or somewhere to live.”
Having settled her own family, found herself a room and completed a self-assigned mission to get a Ukrainian child with cancer in his chest, whom she met in Romania, to a specialist German hospital, Cristina returned to the station to help more refugees. The only time she came close to crying was when she described the welcome refugees receive in Romania:
“They just gave us everything. For the children they had made this room, this massive room, full of every sweet and cake and chocolate you can imagine. It was like a dream or something! And they got all the children together and they gathered them outside the doors and they just opened them and said there you are — it’s all for you. Romanians are incredible.”
The Austrian ticket inspector who combed refugee trains stuffed with fleeing women and children — all of whom had been issued special tickets by the authorities — extorting €160 per person in cash, on pain of ejection at the next station, is incredible in another way.
The worldwide refugee population was around 82 million, according to the UNHCR, before this war drove another 10 million from their homes. The average time it takes a refugee displaced by war to return to their country of origin varies by conflict and era — in cases of protracted catastrophe, it can be 21 years. Many will never return. A young woman I interviewed in Munich, a sales manager with a cat and a dog, who had left with six members of her family, said she would never go back to Ukraine. Her husband was fighting the Russians. She hopes he will live to join her in Germany.
And then there are the children. It is not the babies, toddlers or the little ones you worry about. Their needs are basic and immediate and they travel well, on the whole. It is the plight of the slightly older children, eight or nine and upwards, which gets you.
There was a girl at passport control in Ukraine who was about ten years old. She was wearing a smart jacket and ear warmers. She was in charge of an adult’s suitcase, the wheeled kind you pack for a week away, and also a carrier bag. With her, waiting in the line for people emigrating on foot, were her mother and grandmother.
In a booth, two young female soldiers were handling two lines at once — people coming out of Ukraine, and people going back in. Most of the soldiers at that border near Siret were women, and they looked shattered. There was an uncertain atmosphere all around the border. The sky looked grey and bitter and all I could see of Ukraine was a low ridge, tall trees and rooks.
That girl was being so good. She must have been good for weeks, I thought, ever since the war began. It’s not right, is it, for a ten-year-old to feel she has to behave so well for weeks and months?
In a sports hall a few miles from the border, back in Romania, I interviewed a group of children who are all national and international standard swimmers. They and every refugee I spoke to began their stories in the same way.
“At five in the morning the bombs started.”
Until that point, no one I interviewed had believed the Russians were really going to attack.
Most of the swimmers came from Kyiv and the surrounding region. Their coach had called all their families, a few weeks into the war, and offered to take the children to Romania, where they would be safe, and where they could swim.
They had been assembled in the sports hall to receive backpacks put together by volunteers from the Packed with Hope Campaign. The backpacks contained books in Ukrainian and English, head torches, water bottles and other useful things. There was an extraordinary stillness about the children. In the huge hall they chose to sit grouped tightly together. They regarded Gracie, and her Romanian co-organiser Gabriela Popescu, in a searching, almost unblinking way. They did not fidget or whisper, as any group of British 12 to 16-year-olds would.
When we spoke, they looked at me with a sort of steadiness: it was as though you were another thing in a long line of other things that had paraded through their vision during the course of the weird and terrifying and lonely dream it seemed their lives had become. They all held that measured, assessing, held-together look you see in paramedics and nurses and A & E doctors, the look of someone who has to be strong and calm and philosophical on some level. I had never seen that look in a child’s gaze before. I can see all their faces so clearly now.
The best English speakers were asked to talk to me — I was recording a Radio 4 programme about the road between Britain and Ukraine, the road to the war. I asked them normal things: what are you most interested in studying? What do you plan to do beyond school? They were all pale. One was interested in history, and one in mathematics, and they all said they wanted to continue their studies.
One, one of the oldest, Igor, said that in two years, when he turns 18, he will go back to Ukraine “to fight the fucking Russian pigs and help throw them out of the country”.
I was so glad he said it, and that he got to say it into a BBC microphone, though I doubt we shall be able to broadcast it. The children’s eyes seemed to change as he said it and they nodded and seemed to rouse and draw even closer together. That is something else they have learned, I realise now. They have learned hatred, and because they are still so young and still innocent, they may not even know it yet.
Igor was tremendously articulate, his English was excellent, and as we bade friendly farewells I punched him on the arm and said, “You should be a bloody politician mate!”
He laughed. It was the only time I saw any of them laugh.
Horatio Clare is a writer and broadcaster. His latest book Heavy Light is available now.
HoratioClare 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeLost me in the first paragraph when the author said that Merkel was capable.
And when he decided to casually slag off the UK too.
”but as yet, for shameful political reasons, the British people have been mostly unable to help the people of Ukraine. Germany, a state shaped by Angela Merkel, one of the few leaders of her generation who was both capable and decent, has helped hundreds of thousands.”
There is no explanation of his sweeping justification of ‘political reasons’ that allows us as readers to understand or critique, which is very unusual in Unherd. I suspect it’s some king of veiled accusation that the British Tory government is racist. The same government that is letting hundreds of thousands more non-EU immigrants into the country as well as Hong Kong refugees.
And no reference to the fact that Germany are paying for Putin’s war, so of course they feel the need to assuage their guilt by taking more refugees. They’re really nice to Jews these days too.
Why does Unherd allow such a cliched and casual dismissal of the U.K. – it’s standard jaundiced and lazy journalism and not what I expect from Unherd.
Ah he was working for Radio 4, that explains his sneering animosity for the U.K. – a mandatory qualification for that august Orwellian entity.
Merkle. Capable and decent? She is largely responsible for this catastrophe by her insane policy of trusting the Russians for Germany’s energy.
These upper class British reporters are so drearily predictable. Most people – including their president – would say that Britain has led the world in its response to the Russian invasion while Germany has been a disgrace – unable to respond with any force because of its supine dependency on Russia.
The only people who take an opposite view are writers like Horatio who see Britain as “shameful”. It is not a view held by men called Dave or John, only those called things like Horatio.
Whenever I have read of a disaster from Russia, I had always acknowledged the pain that must have been felt.
Apart from Chernobyl, I can recall watching the briefest of news reports on either ITV or BBC in the summer of 1989 of the Ufa train disaster when probably nearly a thousand Russians died as a result of a gas leak over a rail line that resulted in a fireball as two packed passenger trains passed each other. Ufa I believe is in central Russia and many of the passengers were heading south to go on holiday. Because the disaster occurred on the same day as the Tianamann Square event and the Ayatollah dying, this piece of tragic news was easily forgotten. At the time it was also quite difficult to get news of even a non-military event out of the USSR anyway. But the reason I recall this event in my mind was the novelty of even being able to watch brief footage of the scene of the events from the deep interior of Russia: well, not exactly. It was from a hospital that had treated the many badly burned survivors: and it was the image of two “tough” Russian doctors crumpled up in tears in a treatment room of some kind. A brief three second clip, of a man and a woman, from what I can recall. Perhaps whatever news organisation in the West had obtained news footage from Moscow had had to edit some of it in order to get through what was a busy day of international events. And so maybe there was originally more film. But a three-second clip was all I needed to see that the Russians were human too. As Sting sang, I hope the Russians love their children too.
Another disaster I recall reading about, at the time, was of a bus being hit by a train near St Petersburg in 1990, at the time of the Italia World Cup. I recall reading that the bus driver was in a rush to get back home to watch the football. And dozens died.
More recently there was a passenger plane crash, perhaps six years ago, when, in January I think it was, the plane, having taken off from I guess Moscow, slammed into the frozen ground. I recall reading that one of the victims, who was named, was an air stewardess in her early twenties. And It’s desperate to read about such a young life taken in such a routine way, by merely doing one’s job. And it was a job the young lady may well have been proud of doing.
But not long after that air crash was the shopping centre fire in a mid-Russia city that claimed the lives of about forty people. A piece in the Guardian by a Russian writer soon after claimed that the West ignored the realities of the way Russians had to live as much as Moscow did. It basically said that the West does not care about Russia either. But If only some Russians had known of the concern that Westerners did have. Like me. Who had a few months before read of the tragic plane crash and the young lady air stewardess.
But life IS cheap in Russia. The Ukrainians were an antidote, are, to that fecklessness. Are they not? And I believe that many Russians would like to transform their own society.
Another news item I recall watching from the early 1980s, in relation to Russia, was in fact from America. It concerned the death of a teenage American girl in a light plane crash over perhaps Massachusetts or nearby. Perhaps the individual concerned was from that state. But I think she died with her father who was piloting the plane (if my memory I sincerely hope serves me well). The reason this young lady’s untimely death was reported was that she had been in Russia not long before on a peace mission. (Her smiling face was shown from a photo from when she had been in Russia: if I recall right when she was in traditional Russian dress). To encourage goodwill between Russia and America, perhaps between each country’s youths. And probably in both America and Russia her enterprise, or perhaps it was part of an exchange programme at the time, had made the news. I imagine that her tragic death had made the news in Russia too. And it was on British television, albeit briefly.
Life is precious.
I have not googled any of these stories to jog the memory as it were. Except for the Ufa train disaster. But only to confirm in my mind the memory of that brief TV news report from June of 1989.
This piece ended abruptly. All those Ukrainian refugees must be very weary. If the war were to end tomorrow, I don’t think they would not have the energy to hate. At least Germany is by now, now that it’s early summer, a sunny and safe space. The Kremlin has a lot to be blamed for. It has no shame. Millions of Ukrainians have been driven out of their homeland.
Let me rephrase: I don’t think they would have the energy to hate.
Is what I meant.
Moving piece of normal people being heroic. Thanks for the inspirational story brightening my morning.
It’s so sad about the children. It’s such a shame to subject children to war. I thought we were past wars of colonisation in Europe. Russia needs to get itself together and move on from imperialism like Britain, France, Germany etc.
Excellent writing and observation