My family and I originally come from the former USSR. Back then, we hadn't seen anything else, and I wanted to make it possible for my daughter to go to a Pioneer Meeting in the GDR, which impressed us greatly at the time—the pioneers with their blue scarves, etc. I raised a lot of money within my family to make this trip possible for her. At first, she didn't want to go there at all, preferring to stay home with her friends, but when she returned, she was a completely different person. She met many children from different countries, which was very different from what she knew from the small village where we lived at the time. She even received a blue scarf because the children traded among themselves. She kept it for years. This trip gave her a completely different perspective, and she began to learn with great ambition. I recently found her old report card in my things and saw that she really did get all fives, which in the USSR were the equivalent of A's in the GDR! Unfortunately, everything in the former USSR collapsed. Since we didn't have good connections or money, it was very difficult to get her into university later on. My daughter wasn't accepted despite her excellent grades. She simply wasn't admitted, even though she was such a bright mind! But then we suddenly received an invitation to move to Germany, since my then-husband was Jewish, and it was my ultimate goal for our daughter to be able to study. That took a few more years, though; we weren't able to go to Germany until 2001. She then studied business mathematics at university, and successfully completed it. In the meantime, everything in the former USSR collapsed. All relations with the countries with which we had business ties, as well as my business, collapsed. That was around 1989/90. We stopped receiving a salary. My mother then invited me to her place in Hanover, which was then still West Germany, but I couldn't accept at first because I didn't have the money for the bus fare. I didn't receive a salary for six months, and we lived off what we had in our garden and what we traded. After all, I was an engineer and could no longer work in my profession or my company. My mother paid for my trip; she was unbelievable about the conditions we were living in in Ukraine. It was also an extremely difficult time for my former colleagues. Some of the men even took their own lives because they couldn't cope with the situation any longer. It was truly terrible. I did all sorts of jobs after that: sewing, cleaning, and cutting hair. We even did wallpapering for people with my daughter. Later, I helped people and children affected by Chernobyl and supported them in their daily lives; I did a kind of social work there. We never imagined that the USSR and the GDR would be so ruined. I did that for almost 10 years, and only in the last 2-3 years have I returned to work as a technical draftsman at a refrigeration company. I was desperate for my daughter to have a better future than what she could have expected here, and in 2001, we finally moved to Germany as a family. When I think about it now, I see that this difficult time has made me stronger. Today, I support people in need by translating into German. Since then, I have been able to understand people in need even better, and I have developed more empathy. Since then, I have also been able to appreciate what I have in life much more, given that we lost everything we had built up. But my family and my health have become the most important things to me, in contrast to my previous values, which were more materialistic. I am very happy that my daughter is doing well here, but I still feel a certain sadness because, after all, the rest of my family stayed behind in Ukraine.
