Slovakia used to reject refugees. Now we are welcoming them.

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – When I read the news in the American press about what is happening in Ukraine, or talk to my friends in Western Europe, I can always say that despite the shock and horror we feel I share, they remain detached from what is going on. . War is dangerous and anything can happen, but it’s war in a far away place.

That’s not how we feel about that in Slovakia. Our leaders are constantly assured by their leaders that NATO will protect the countries on its eastern flank, but that is not always as welcoming as they intended. Immediately after the invasion, there was panic. The first people started asking about the nearest shelters (there is not enoughand they are in a desperate situation), then they run to passport offices, and then some even start buying iodine pills in the hope of protecting them from a nuclear attack.

That panic seems to have passed now, but there are still a lot of fears we all live with. My kid came home from school asking me all kinds of questions I never expected to answer, and it was horrible. And while bullets and bombs may not have penetrated Slovakia, thousands of Ukrainian refugees are still there. For Slovakia, a country of about 5.4 million people that shares a border with Ukraine, it was the refugees who brought the war home. In many cases into literally people’s homes.

So far, more than 62,000 people asked for temporary protection, special refugee regime for Ukrainians that gives them easy access to health care, education systems and the labor market. Ukrainians can also enter Slovakia without a visa for 90 days. Many people here “visit” their relatives, as there was a large Ukrainian community in Slovakia before the war.

For those who do not have acquaintances here, local residents have stepped up. One of them is my brother. For almost a week, he and his wife hosted a Ukrainian woman, Vita, and her three children, 15, 10, and 5. Vita arrived by train from Bratislava late one night. Her husband had to stay behind for the war effort. But she decided to run away with her children after three weeks hiding in their basement in Kharkiv while Russian troops shelled the eastern Ukrainian city. It took them three days to cross Ukraine while avoiding Russian tanks, reach the Slovak border and then travel by train to the capital. When they arrived at the refugee train station’s information point, a volunteer picked my brother’s phone number from a list of people who offered to shelter in their own home.

Businesses also strengthen. I’m in contact with a hotel in a city near me, Trnava, which started housing refugees and has now built a complete organization around it with enough rooms, food, even air. time for online classes – some kids still have classes with teachers. in a war zone in Ukraine! Meanwhile, a group of volunteers searches for homes, organizes relocations, helps people register with immigration authorities, searches for jobs and more.

To all the Slovaks involved, this sequence of events had seemed like fiction just a few weeks earlier. Now, thousands of families have a story like my brother to share. Amid the fury and terror of war, a wave of compassion and solidarity swept over my country and changed it.

In 2015, Slovakia is among the EU member states rejected the reallocation of refugees from the Middle East and Africa around the EU to ease the burden on Mediterranean countries. When Slovakia has been appointed to take over 802 asylum seekers have arrived in Italy and Greece, the country EU lawsuit

After the Russian invasion, Slovakia finally understood what it meant to be a good neighbor and adopted an open door policy. It is a statement that is repeated in every speech by every member of government, and it stands in stark contrast to what politicians across the ideology were saying seven years ago.

What has changed? The most understandable answer is that the Ukrainians are “people just like us”, which forces the Slovak people to help them more than they ever dreamed of helping, say the Syrians. But it’s clear that the change of heart goes beyond just racism, partly because negative attitudes towards Ukrainians have undergone some changes.

Before the Russian invasion, Ukrainians were primarily considered temporary workers in auto, agricultural or construction factories. Now, the people of Slovakia have a chance to get to know them. Many people have new Ukrainian colleagues and their children have Ukrainian schoolmates, and they are finding common ground and ignoring some of the differences that they decried before.

The funding is also supported by the way Ukraine recalls our own history. First, there is a nagging, if somewhat inaccurate, memory of “Russian tanks”, a symbolic reference to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the allied nations of the Soviet Union, which Slovakia part of the Cold War. The invasion, carried out by many forces not only Russian, ended the democratization movement of the Prague Spring and strengthen the power of the totalitarian regime here for another two decades, pushing Tens of thousands of people had to flee their homeland.

Most importantly, when Slovak people watched videos of Ukrainian cities being dumped, neighborhoods with demolished communist-era prefab apartment buildings looked exactly like their own, when they saw the Children crossing the border wearing clothes from the same retail chains, they can’t help but think: “That could be us.”

But while it warms my heart that so many Slovaks are welcoming me right now, I know that it probably won’t last. The dark forces in society are inherently difficult to operate. Information outlets, internet scammers and the right quickly recovered from the initial shock of the invasion. Refugees, and the effort to help them, is one of the main goals of propaganda. Articles on Vitriolic and Facebook posts describing refugees as criminals are sprinkled with various versions of “What about helping the Slovak people first?”

Whatever danger lurks, however, the experience of the past few weeks has the potential to give a lasting impetus to Slovakia’s burgeoning civil society. Being a good citizen now means providing tangible, practical help. Most of the people who are helping refugees now have never done anything like this before, possibly never even meeting a refugee. They didn’t know they had it in them, but now they know, they’ll never be the same people they used to be.

Indeed, the whole country will never be the same. We now know that we are capable of community efforts beyond ourselves. The challenge for the country is to turn this into a story on which we can build our collective identity. This is also who we are.

at Blogtuan.info – Source: nbcnews.com – Read the original article here