Refugees from Ukraine

How safe we sit in New Zealand, far from the war.

I live in a peaceful country, New Zealand, where we have freedoms unimaginable to the people of Ukraine right now. Perhaps unimaginable to people in many countries. This morning, I heard the long rolling thunder of a sub tropical storm that has just hit us in Auckland at 5 AM, and I thought about the people in Mariupol, Ukraine, and in particular the 400 people in an art school that was bombed yesterday.

I thought of the refugees. Almost 3 and a half million people have left Ukraine with whatever they could carry. That's 70% of the entire population of New Zealand, less Wellington.

My late grandmother Elisabeth Augustin wrote a poem about refugees. It was about Jewish, Gypsy, Coloured, Gay and handicapped people leaving Germany. She wrote it on the 10th of December 1938 in Amsterdam. It could just as easily have been written on the 21st of March 2022. These are the last lines of her poem. If you read them, you might get the tiniest impression of what those 3.4 million (and growing) people are feeling.

And we have merely started legislating about sanctions.

In the distance we hear organ music
coming from a church
or the singing of young girls
coming from a village.
Then we pause
to quietly listen, and we travel on
for we are strangers wherever we go.
We only stop briefly
where they ask us to stay,
stay and rest, sit down and eat
or even lie down and sleep.
Then we taste the sweetness
a home may give.
Then too, while we can, we dream
we have found our destiny,
and may rest forever.
That may last a day,
sometimes also a night, or two.
But always comes a morning
to subdue the dream with light
with the cold, hard light
the days bring along
banishing all illusions.
We have to pick up our walking sticks
and our bundles of meagre possessions.
Strangers we must be again,
passing by everywhere and,
just once or twice,

we look into a window that is lit up,
as if it opens into Heaven.

My grandmother was a well-known writer of books, novels, radio plays, poetry and other material. She was very much focused on dispossessed people, having fled her home in Leipzig, Germany with her husband in the early 1930’s when it became clear that even though my grandfather was Swiss-German, and considered to be a perfect Aryan, by Hitler’s standards, standing around 6 foot 2, she was Jewish and likely to be in danger. She had wanted to become an actress and had a few bit roles. She also used to tell me she was part Gypsy, but that was just a dream.

She loved German stage shows and Brecht was one of her favourites. I lived in Holland between the ages of 11 and 13 and used to stay with my Omi and Opa every second weekend.

So in my Top 500 songs, I have to include one of the versions of Mack the Knife, by one of her favourite writers of her youth, Bertold Brecht, who wrote Threepenny Opera, but not the version you know. She would play me lots of versions from the 1930s. I still have a cassette with at least 10 different versions, none of them of the quality of this version.

I would sit quietly through these, being polite because one was pretty much enough, but it was part of my heritage. My patience was rewarded though when one day in 1970, she took me to the movies to watch the extended version of the Woodstock movie.

She gave me a musical education like no other. At the time I used to listen to Radio Veronica, in my bedroom through a transistor radio, that I had placed strategically in the wooden drawer of my desk, which was like a speaker cabinet. I spent hours listening to the hot rock of the late 60s, like Joe Cocker’s With a Little Help from my friends.

My apologies to The Beatles, but I have always preferred his version to the original.

Woodstock was also of course a peace festival and many of the people there were protestors and draft dodgers. Country Joe & the Fish were also influential in my music with I’m Fixing to Die. This song makes me think of the Russian soldiers who have been conscripted into the army to invade Ukraine, who do not believe in the war and do not want to be killing their neighbours.

So this post is dedicated to the refugees, but also to the Russians who have been drafted into the military to go and commit war crimes on behalf of their leader, and the 13,000 or more brave protesters in Russia who have been arrested for protesting against the Ukraine invasion.

This is not a political book, but as someone who has had relatives murdered in Sobibor, in Auschwitz, in Bergen Belsen and other camps, even in the street in Amsterdam in WWII, I can’t ignore it.

I’ll leave the last word to Richie Havens at Woodstock, while I quietly thank my late grandmother who was already elderly at the time she took me to the movie, for sitting through the very loud extended version for almost 5 hours. She told me she enjoyed it and would take me again if I wanted. I spared her that, but I still have the album set and the 40-page program that she bought for me at the theatre in Amsterdam.

I hope we can all do more for these people in Ukraine. They must get their country and their freedom back. If they don’t I fear Ukraine will just be the first country. The people of Finland are already getting very worried, and I’m sure other neighbours are the same.

#refugees #Ukraine #ukrainecrisis #sanctions #War #ukraineinvasion #homeless