Dhe three words in the title come from Sebastian Haffner, with them the English edition of his book “History of a German”, written on the eve of the Second World War, ends. Last year we were spellbound by reading this book about the rise of fascism, looking for and finding points of agreement with our current situation. And now many of us who left – to Yerevan, Tbilisi, Baku, Astana, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Samarkand – also felt these words on our own bodies: chilly, ashamed, liberated.
We – that is those who left (ran away, fled) their country shortly after it invaded Ukraine. We hate war, we hate the one who unleashed it, yet we had no intention of leaving our homeland (our birthland, fatherland) – all these words are besmirched and disgraced. The temptation to regard oneself as the flower of the nation (“philosopher’s ship”, “we are the real Russia” and the like – such excesses can also be heard) is to be dismissed as dangerous nonsense. Some say that when you lose, you realize your true worth. We will see it, because we are indeed losers, historically and spiritually. Hundreds of thousands, millions of people who are our like-minded people stayed there and went about their business: treating patients, caring for elderly parents and others. But however much we who have left are ashamed of those who have remained, one must not forget that the watershed between us compatriots runs at a completely different point: between opponents and supporters of this war.
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