Written April 2022
Just a few weeks after our group fled to the Czech Republic, I went to visit Anya’s apartment. I found a bag sitting in the hallway in front of their door. It had a globe and some drinking glasses in it. I assumed that some one had just left a small a gift for the family, so I took it in.
The next day, Anya had me look more closely at the globe. Most of Europe was smudged out and a smiley face was drawn there. There were little arrows drawn to different parts of the world.
My first thought was that a kid had made marks to places that he had heard about or wanted to travel to.
Anya saw a more sinister message. A message to the refugees that they should go home. Europe was a happy place where they were not welcome.
I’ve been around enough marginalized people to understand that while every perceived discrimination may not be real, only fools don’t listen.
Just the day before, Anya had two encounters.
The first was in the stairwell of their apartment building. Some neighbors were complaining that the Safe Haven kids were making the stairs dirty (and to be fair, I did see a few leaves on the stairs this morning, but there is no way of knowing who tracked them in). They told Anya that she needed to clean the stairs. Anya agreed to do this. Then they told her that she needed to clean all the stairs everyday.
There are 40 apartments sharing one set of stairs. This is clearly not a fair expectation.
Anya very clearly received their message that they were a lower class of tenant.
Later, Anya was walking with Lena and Sabina around the neighborhood and got a little bit turned around. An older gentleman came up to them and asked them if they needed help. When they answered in Ukrainian, he asked them where they were from.
“Ukriane.”
“Do you know what is happening in your country?”
So they started to tell him about the Russians that have invaded and are bombing cities all over the country.
But he quickly interrupted them and started saying that eight years ago, it was Ukrainian protesters on Maidan who killed other Ukrainian protestors. He told them that for eight years, the Ukrainian army had been killing their own people in the Donbas region, and that right now the Ukrainian government was bombing its own cities, and the Russian army was trying to move in to save the people from its own government. After having lived through those missile strikes at the beginning of the war, Anya had had enough. She said, “Stop” and just walked away.
It’s no secret that Russian has been flooding every country with misinformation and propaganda for decades. They want to shape the perception of Russia and it’s actions. They also want to feed our base impulses to be afraid of each other, to nudge people to the worst forms of isolationism, xenophobia and distrust of our institutions. Most countries in the world have strong nationalist movements and parties that have been built with direct help from Russia.
As a result of this, no one was naive to the fact that those sentiments run strong in most countries.
Dealing with ethnic or racial prejudice is hard, but the misinformation part makes things much harder. How do you react to someone who tells you that the facts, facts that you’ve seen and experienced, are wrong? There is no reasoning with that.
There are amazing Czech people who are helping Safe Haven and other Ukrainians. My perception is that this group is in the majority. But there are also people who think of Ukrainians as lower class.
I don’t know if the globe was a message or just a hand-me-down from some kid. We probably never will. But Anya isn’t wrong to be sensitive to that kind of message. She has to be if she is going to be able to shield her kids from the worst of it.
What do you do in the face of racism like this? What do you do when people aren’t just believing lies but are spreading them?
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