Die ganz persönliche Sicht ihrer Auswanderung aus der Ukraine hat eine Kollegiatin im Englisch-Grundkurs in Form dieses Berichtes dargestellt.

Only 3 months before our departure I got to know that my family and I would move to Germany. I was nearly 16 years old, when I arrived in Germany with several suitcases and after two days of bus travel. Actually, life here is almost the same as at home, in the Ukraine, except that people wear only jeans, speak another language and the fact that there isn’t any rubbish in the streets, but dog’s crap. Not being able to understand a single word of German I not only got depressed, but also afraid. The idea that I could be asked for the way or the time drove me into a panic. Only after 2.5 year of attending German schools I began to trust myself to take part in class. I don’t like to remember the numberless times, when I was thinking about a missing German word to express myself. The feeling of despair and helplessness happens, whenever I try to put into words my knowledge, ideas or feelings. It is the nice word “integration” I could discuss about for hours. Sometimes I ask myself why do I think about the past again and again instead of looking towards the future? Perhaps some people will say, I should try to concentrate on my new life instead of looking backwards. But to defend myself I can just answer that it is impossible to change everything from one day to the other. Russian friends, Russian TV and Russian books, all of them construct a dream world suggesting the feeling of being at home. Of course, Germany offers a lot of opportunities for living in dignity, but, to my mind, a kind of affinity or accordance with the country is missing here. The saddest and most difficult thing in the life of foreigners is going on a holiday to their home country and realising that they don’t belong there any longer. They feel like falling between two stools. Friends have become strangers. You don’t recognize your home town any longer. The values and the behaviour of my former life don’t apply here: Just picture the first school day in September. I couldn’t imagine to come to school without a bunch of flowers for my class teacher. In my opinion this is a pleasant custom to show your respect towards people being involved in our education. It’s a pity that this habit isn´t established in Germany. On the other hand I always was concerned that there are so many fare dodgers on busses and trams. Even when they are caught, they are brazen-faced enough to start a discussion with the inspector about reducing the fare, sometimes by very intelligent means. Some pretend to be deaf, some don’t want to pay because of a family member working at the city council.

Well, thinking about this mental diremption you arrive at a certain point where you don’t have any idea how and in which direction life is going…

Serkova Anna (immigrated 4 years ago), 20 years old, was born in Kharkov,Ukraine, the most beautiful town in the world. By the way, it is a twin city of Nuremberg. The total population is about 1.7 million .The main square is the biggest in Europe and the second biggest in the world!

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