I’ve been thinking about the word displacement a lot, and the Ukrainians who have been displaced.
The images of mostly women and children walking in their brightly coloured winter gear on highways, along train platforms, crowded at borders, holding sad-looking toys and sucking dummies. They will soon reach the UK in their hundreds of thousands, we’re told, except refugee charities report that visa applications are still woefully fraught with red tape. Not that my under-the-stairs Harry Potter cupboard would count as a spare room anyway.
While on a 40th birthday celebration in Marrakech I was eager to quiz a friend who has managed to host a Ukrainian family. The contrast of us lounging on poolside daybeds gazing at palm trees while talking about this extreme displacement is in itself mad, but in truth, to host a family, one has to have means and considerable space.
Veronika Heilbrunner is an editor and influencer who lives in an idyllically spacious house in Bavaria with her three-year-old son, Walter, and her husband, Justin O’Shea — something of a style icon himself. They’re not your average couple throwing open their doors but it is nonetheless a giant undertaking.
The father is in Ukraine fighting, keeping in touch via Telegram. The sadness permeates Veronika’s home
‘We spontaneously just thought we have a guest room and we were like why not?’ says Veronika in her naturally easy, breezy way — the same way I might ask ‘why not?’ to eventually weeding the garden. The arrival of Ukrainian refugees in Germany was almost instantaneous, a week after Russia’s invasion. She cited Germany’s relative proximity to Ukraine as well as the news feed of images of people arriving in Berlin with nothing except the clothes on their backs. ‘Germans always feel extra guilty.’
Veronika surreptitiously found a family to host, during a casual conversation with a Ukrainian-born, German-based influencer at an Hermès show in Paris. Just as fashion week was being pelted on social media for being tone deaf, it was interesting to see that the privileged can and do move fast when the will is there. A week later a car pulled and up and a 36-year-old mother and her two sons arrived and have settled in. Their residency papers and support cheques in Germany were also quickly secured.
‘We don’t have any friends to come and stay with us because we live so far away,’ Justin jokes. But jest aside, there has been an underestimation of how delicate it is to host a family who have been uprooted from everything they know. The 14-year-old son speaks English and is the primary translator but he’s a gamer who doesn’t get up until 11am and is reluctant to integrate into a German-speaking environment. The five-year old, who has severe allergies so can’t attend kindergarten, suffers tantrums and has taken to bullying young Walter, which is difficult to broach. The mother has been shell-shocked into chain-smoking as she starts job-hunting, having been a housewife and seeing their money rejected from German banks. The father is in Ukraine fighting, keeping in touch through Telegram. The sadness is palpable and permeates Veronika’s home.
For now, the family don’t quite know if they want to stay in Germany as they have distant relatives in Canada. Veronika will be attempting to aid this moving process: another place, another uprooting. Veronika and Justin will also be on the move because of their work and they’ve admirably allowed free rein on their home. ‘They have air to breathe and room to move,’ Veronika says.
