As the number of refugees leaving Ukraine has surpassed four million, tens of thousands have streamed into Central Station in Berlin. I recently visited the enormous, glass-panelled structure. Past escalators and fast-food restaurants, and on walkways over trains pulling in and out of platforms, came families, couples, groups, and lone travellers, holding suitcases and backpacks and the hands of small children. Most of those people were Ukrainian, but there were also Ghanaians, Nigerians, Indians, and Nepalis. At a nearby hostel that provided rooms and food, for every Ukrainian, I saw a Turkish or Moroccan or Pakistani person, waiting in line for lunch, on their phones, sitting around. Many of them looked dazed. Almost all the Ukrainians I spoke to told me that they had no real plans beyond their arrival at the hostel; they were waiting for their home to become safe again. They were mostly women; their husbands and brothers were still in Ukraine, going to fight or waiting to be drafted. “It’s shit,” a slight woman named Olga, whose parents, husband, and brother were still in Kyiv, told me. “Because I’m alone, and I’m scared for my family.” She had her young son with her. Olga was still working in sales for her employer remotely, and was thinking about going to another, cheaper city, somewhere outside Berlin, to make a temporary life.
But, for some of the other uprooted people whose first homes were not in Ukraine, Germany represented a different kind of challenge—and desire. According to the Ukrainian State Center for International Education, there were some eighty thousand foreign students in the country in 2019, the most recent year with available data. With Ukraine no longer an option, many of these students, who had planned on completing their degrees and spending part of their lives in Europe, felt that staying, even as refugees, would be better than returning to their native countries. As economic migrants fleeing a war, they had become part of Europe’s earlier migration crisis, and its new one.
When I first met Chioma Benjamin Egwim, a twenty-one-year-old Nigerian who had arrived in Berlin a few days before, after crossing into Hungary from Ukraine, he looked shell-shocked, and like he was recovering from a bad cold. Wearing a long cream-colored coat, he was watchful and spoke quietly. I asked if he was doing O.K.; he smiled and insisted he was fine. He had come to Ukraine for a cybersecurity program, and had been taking language lessons for the past several months in Kharkiv. “It was going well,” he recalled. “It wasn’t too expensive for we students. It was an easy life there, peaceful to study.” The conflict had caught him by surprise, but he quickly realized he had to make a plan. “I had made up my mind to survive in any way,” he said.
That afternoon, we walked from the hostel—which was still operating for regular customers, too—with some of his friends down the street to a café. In Ukraine, many of the African students knew each other. They already had a WhatsApp group, which they later used to help navigate humiliations and abuses as they fled the country. Egwim had heard rumors of war since last November, but didn’t believe them until he saw an explosion from his apartment in late February. Shaking, he put on his shoes, took his passport, and spent the next few days underground in a nearby metro station. “It was getting more serious every day,” he said. At one point, he tried to venture to his apartment to cook and bathe, but it felt too dangerous, and he went back underground. In the station, he stood among crowds of people. “I felt heartbroken seeing old men standing up,” he said. “I had pity for the old women who were there. I couldn’t sleep. That was it—I started running.”
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Egwim called his brother in Turkey, who told him to keep going. “My family was so worried. They were calling, calling,” he said. He and his neighbors decided to go to the border. There were no cars on the road, so they had to take a train. “It was snowing that day,” he said. “I was so cold. I was standing outside for three to four hours.” The train conductor pushed the Black people away as the white people boarded, until she finally let everyone on. Egwim eventually crossed into Hungary. He received little help in Budapest, where he had to pay for his own hotel and meals. “You just had to find your way,” he said. As we talked, his phone rang; it was another friend, Elvis Chigaemezu, who joined us at the café with a bag of donated clothes. He had left Ukraine with only what he was wearing. Egwim brightened as the two greeted each other.
A cold wind swept through the plaza. We drank our coffees, and Egwim and Chigaemezu sent messages to friends, who were in various stages of transit. (African students are still being held in detention centers in Poland, Austria, and Estonia.) They talked about how reluctant they had been to leave Ukraine. It was an accomplishment to move there in the first place. The two Nigerians had chosen the country because university fees were much lower there than at schools in places such as the United Kingdom or France, but the quality of instruction in fields, including medicine, computer science, and international law, was high. They could take classes in English, and they were still attending college in Europe. They had each paid around four or five thousand dollars for the academic year, money they could not get back. In Berlin, they were already running out of the little they had left. “People are becoming stranded. They don’t have a place to sleep,” Chigaemezu said. “The volunteers said Berlin is full.” Nigeria, like many former colonies of the richest nations in Europe, is a country full of young, ambitious people looking to get out, for a better education, better jobs, a better start. The chance to do so is becoming increasingly rare for people from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and other parts of the world; in recent years, would-be migrants have faced rising hurdles to leave for immediate humanitarian reasons, and also for economic and educational ones. “My family said we should go to the nearest neighboring countries to look for a secure life,” Chigaemezu said. “Going back is not an option.”
As the number of refugees leaving Ukraine has surpassed four million, tens of thousands have streamed into Central Station in Berlin. I recently visited the enormous, glass-panelled structure. Past escalators and fast-food restaurants, and on walkways over trains pulling in and out of platforms, came families, couples, groups, and lone travellers, holding suitcases and backpacks and the hands of small children. Most of those people were Ukrainian, but there were also Ghanaians, Nigerians, Indians, and Nepalis. At a nearby hostel that provided rooms and food, for every Ukrainian, I saw a Turkish or Moroccan or Pakistani person, waiting in line for lunch, on their phones, sitting around. Many of them looked dazed. Almost all the Ukrainians I spoke to told me that they had no real plans beyond their arrival at the hostel; they were waiting for their home to become safe again. They were mostly women; their husbands and brothers were still in Ukraine, going to fight or waiting to be drafted. “It’s shit,” a slight woman named Olga, whose parents, husband, and brother were still in Kyiv, told me. “Because I’m alone, and I’m scared for my family.” She had her young son with her. Olga was still working in sales for her employer remotely, and was thinking about going to another, cheaper city, somewhere outside Berlin, to make a temporary life.But, for some of the other uprooted people whose first homes were not in Ukraine, Germany represented a different kind of challenge—and desire. According to the Ukrainian State Center for International Education, there were some eighty thousand foreign students in the country in 2019, the most recent year with available data. With Ukraine no longer an option, many of these students, who had planned on completing their degrees and spending part of their lives in Europe, felt that staying, even as refugees, would be better than returning to their native countries. As economic migrants fleeing a war, they had become part of Europe’s earlier migration crisis, and its new one.When I first met Chioma Benjamin Egwim, a twenty-one-year-old Nigerian who had arrived in Berlin a few days before, after crossing into Hungary from Ukraine, he looked shell-shocked, and like he was recovering from a bad cold. Wearing a long cream-colored coat, he was watchful and spoke quietly. I asked if he was doing O.K.; he smiled and insisted he was fine. He had come to Ukraine for a cybersecurity program, and had been taking language lessons for the past several months in Kharkiv. “It was going well,” he recalled. “It wasn’t too expensive for we students. It was an easy life there, peaceful to study.” The conflict had caught him by surprise, but he quickly realized he had to make a plan. “I had made up my mind to survive in any way,” he said.Egwim had chosen to study in Ukraine because university fees were much lower there than in countries such as the U.K. or France, but the quality of instruction was high.That afternoon, we walked from the hostel—which was still operating for regular customers, too—with some of his friends down the street to a café. In Ukraine, many of the African students knew each other. They already had a WhatsApp group, which they later used to help navigate humiliations and abuses as they fled the country. Egwim had heard rumors of war since last November, but didn’t believe them until he saw an explosion from his apartment in late February. Shaking, he put on his shoes, took his passport, and spent the next few days underground in a nearby metro station. “It was getting more serious every day,” he said. At one point, he tried to venture to his apartment to cook and bathe, but it felt too dangerous, and he went back underground. In the station, he stood among crowds of people. “I felt heartbroken seeing old men standing up,” he said. “I had pity for the old women who were there. I couldn’t sleep. That was it—I started running.”[Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today »]Egwim called his brother in Turkey, who told him to keep going. “My family was so worried. They were calling, calling,” he said. He and his neighbors decided to go to the border. There were no cars on the road, so they had to take a train. “It was snowing that day,” he said. “I was so cold. I was standing outside for three to four hours.” The train conductor pushed the Black people away as the white people boarded, until she finally let everyone on. Egwim eventually crossed into Hungary. He received little help in Budapest, where he had to pay for his own hotel and meals. “You just had to find your way,” he said. As we talked, his phone rang; it was another friend, Elvis Chigaemezu, who joined us at the café with a bag of donated clothes. He had left Ukraine with only what he was wearing. Egwim brightened as the two greeted each other.A cold wind swept through the plaza. We drank our coffees, and Egwim and Chigaemezu sent messages to friends, who were in various stages of transit. (African students are still being held in detention centers in Poland, Austria, and Estonia.) They talked about how reluctant they had been to leave Ukraine. It was an accomplishment to move there in the first place. The two Nigerians had chosen the country because university fees were much lower there than at schools in places such as the United Kingdom or France, but the quality of instruction in fields, including medicine, computer science, and international law, was high. They could take classes in English, and they were still attending college in Europe. They had each paid around four or five thousand dollars for the academic year, money they could not get back. In Berlin, they were already running out of the little they had left. “People are becoming stranded. They don’t have a place to sleep,” Chigaemezu said. “The volunteers said Berlin is full.” Nigeria, like many former colonies of the richest nations in Europe, is a country full of young, ambitious people looking to get out, for a better education, better jobs, a better start. The chance to do so is becoming increasingly rare for people from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and other parts of the world; in recent years, would-be migrants have faced rising hurdles to leave for immediate humanitarian reasons, and also for economic and educational ones. “My family said we should go to the nearest neighboring countries to look for a secure life,” Chigaemezu said. “Going back is not an option.”