GRANTEE
It is difficult to describe the feelings of a person who locks their home without knowing whether they will ever return. According to statistics, more than 160,000 buildings and elements of the Ukrainian infrastructure have been destroyed as a result of the Russian military aggression. Almost 20,000 of them are multistorey residential buildings. 2.5 million Ukrainian citizens have either partially or completely lost their homes. This does not include temporarily occupied territories where it is currently impossible to make estimates.
According to the latest data from the UN Human Rights Office, more than 1 million refugees from Ukraine are registered in Germany, and more than 700,000 have received official residence permits. Thus, Germany is the country that has received by far the most Ukrainian citizens. Also, over the past year, there has been a significant outflow of refugees from Poland to Germany. This may indicate the comfortable conditions which Germany has created for them—providing housing, health insurance, financial assistance, etc.
There are no statistics which show how many of these people have nowhere to return because of the destruction of their homes. Given the general destruction of the infrastructure and its slow and insignificant reconstruction, there are obviously many such people. What have they lost in Ukraine? What is their life like in Germany? Do they plan to return after the end of the hostilities? Have their desires, feelings, and self-identification changed during their stay in Germany? These are important questions requiring not a statistical but an existential analysis.
Thus, the project aims to create 11 documentary short stories based on interviews with Ukrainian citizens whose homes have been completely destroyed and who are now living in Germany.
The sample includes Ukrainian citizens from regions most affected by bombing—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Odesa, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Dnipro, Mykolaiv, and Sumy.
Current place of residence: any federal state of Germany. Age: from 21 years. It is important that the interviewees were of legal age at the time of leaving Ukraine. Gender: approximately 7 women and 4 men (according to the refugees’ declarations).
Search for story donors: announcements in all possible groups of Ukrainians operating on social channels (Telegram, Facebook, etc.). There is a significant number of such groups with a wide reach. My experience with the previous project which included Ukrainian teenagers in Germany showed the responsiveness of Ukrainians willing to share their stories.
The interviews will be conducted online via Zoom, and offline for residents of Baden-Württemberg, as I live here. The anonymity of the story donors must be ensured so that we may obtain frank and truthful information. After processing the interviews, we plan to write short stories based on documentary evidence. Each will reveal the story of forced emigration from the point of view of a specific person who has experienced it firsthand. This will enable us to recreate the fates of people who have lost an important part of their past—both material (home, work, garden, forest) and spiritual (environment, family ties, family archives, photographs, etc.) — and describe their new life as refugees. Moreover, it will help us understand how difficult or easy it was for them to adapt to completely different conditions and whether they want to return to their homeland (and, respectively, why they do or do not want to).
The voices of living people must be recorded and heard. Otherwise, their tragic experiences will remain with them alone, and history may lose important documents of the era.