What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
A father bids farewell to his daughter, she is to take the train away from Kiev, away from the danger. He bends down to her, she is still very small. The father wants to show strength, he wants to take away his daughter’s fears.
He is not allowed to leave the country, like all conscript men in Ukraine.
He gives his daughter a necklace and says: You must always wear it.
I had this scene translated for me by a Ukrainian who lives in my house. Suddenly the father kneels in front of his daughter, pulls her to him and starts to cry hard.
This harrowing video shows more than tanks and destroyed houses. It declares war better than any analysis, any graph.
The children always suffer. The little girl from Vietnam who runs away from the flames crying. The little boy in shorts from the Warsaw Ghetto holding up his hands for fear of the SS. Who would have thought that images like this could be repeated?
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
Decades lie between them. And yet it seems like anything could have happened today.
The scene in which a father says goodbye to his daughter at the train station has a harrowing effect. There is no tank, no soldier with a gun. It is the look at an apparent normality that makes us shudder. It’s like a reflection of our life suddenly invaded by the unimaginable.
This father with his daughter – that’s all of us.
We cannot and must not shut ourselves off from such images. The least we can do is think of the people of Ukraine. Many may say that doesn’t help them either. I see it differently. Thoughts can also have great power. A Ukrainian said in front of the cameras: Please don’t forget us, please don’t let us down, we are a part of you.
These words hit the heart. We should not go about our daily lives as if nothing had happened. The world has become different, much colder.
Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts are available as a book at koehler-mittler-shop.de.