“You could be a refugee.” But should that even matter?
Why I’m developing a podcast about refugees in the Czech Republic
Two years ago, my friend Giuseppe Picheca and I released a 10-episode podcast about foreigners in the Czech Republic, beginning and ending with the stories of refugees. As we completed our final interviews for the series, we began to notice how many people had told us a version of the same thing: If it happened to me, it could happen to you, too.
Fast forward to exactly one year ago, when 700 miles to the east of us explosions were reported in Kyiv, a city that is, like Prague, dotted with onion domes, its language a familiar flurry of consonants; like Prague, it is a place with an affection for cabbage and dumplings and, most importantly, with a fraught history with Moscow.
In those early days of the invasion, when it was impossible to comprehend that the war would stretch on weeks or months — much less a full year — into the future, I remember hearing the voice of one of our interviewees for Foreign Insiders playing over and over as if on a loop in my head. In 1992, Ena Stevanovic, then six years old, was attending a birthday party at a neighbor’s apartment in Sarajevo when bombs started going off outside. Ena’s family remained in Bosnia for six months before she and her mother and sister joined a convoy to Czechoslovakia, where they were granted asylum. “I had a perfectly normal life,” Ena, now in her 30s, told us. “We were kids, we were going to school, my parents were educated, had good jobs, we had a flat, and suddenly boom — and you have nothing.”
“Anyone can be a refugee,” she added. “You can be a refugee.”
When the war started last year, I felt the truth of what Ena told us like a jolt to my nervous system. I also felt a visceral heartache for the Ukrainians bidding loved ones goodbye, piling onto trains, and disembarking in a traumatized haze in countries that had no idea how to support such vast numbers of vulnerable people.
Millions of Czechs felt the same. This country opened its homes and its pocketbooks, donated huge sums of money, crowdfunded the purchase of an army tank, turned out en masse to demonstrations in support of Ukraine, and unfurled yellow-and-blue flags from its windows. It also provided asylum to more people per capita than any other nation in the world.
That last achievement is particularly notable. Infamously, the Czech Republic shirked its duty to take in 2,000 migrants from camps in southern Europe at the peak of the migration wave in 2015, accepting, instead, just 12. Prior to the start of the war, its president had taken pains to remain in Putin’s good graces and had campaigned with billboards suggesting he would keep immigrants out of the country. The country had, only a few months earlier, ousted a populist legislative party whose leader had publicly mused about the absurdity of accepting even 50 Syrian children. (“There are orphans even in the Czech Republic, and we must take care of them,” he said. “Why should we be taking care of Syrian orphans, of all people?”)
Racism certainly played a role in the about-face. One need only look to the nation’s inhumane treatment of its Roma citizens for evidence of disregard for the needs of brown-skinned people. (Indeed, one subset of Ukrainians who did not receive an arms-wide-open welcome last year was its Roma minority.) But I believe the negative precedent was also a consequence of ignorance — not just about the countries ravaged by war, oppression, and persecution, but about who, exactly, is fleeing those countries. What they eat. What music they listen to. What they do for fun in peacetime. How they are like Czechs, and why their stories matter to Czech people.
I so often think about Neville Chamberlain’s distasteful turn of phrase in his radio address announcing the Munich betrayal, the decision to siphon off the Sudetenland in order to appease Adolf Hitler in 1938. Chamberlain referred to the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia as a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” How ironic that that’s the dismissive stance much of this country’s political leadership, and indeed the public, has taken towards vulnerable foreigners until very recent days.
Where the media can help, I think, is in bridging the gap between us and them.
Last October, I spoke with a young woman from Kharkiv, “Olesya,” who arrived the Czech Republic with her two elementary-school-aged sons. The elder boy struggles with a behavioral disorder, and Olesya said that no school in Prague would accept him. As a result, Olesya was unable to work a stable job, despite having already learned an extraordinary amount of Czech. Her monthly utility bill for her tiny apartment was 6,000 crowns (approximately $270, 60% of the average monthly wage in Ukraine in 2021). As of the summer, she’d been forced to pay for her own health insurance, but she hadn’t yet seen a doctor despite having medical concerns because she couldn’t afford the registration fee.
When we spoke, Olesya was frantic, blinking back tears. I asked her if, at the very least, she had been treated kindly in this country. Sometimes people are kind, she told me. Sometimes they hear me speaking Russian on the street, and they call me “Ukrainian c*nt.”
The voice of Ena from Sarajevo continues to echo in my mind today, but for new reasons. Ena and her mother and sister had such poor quality of life in Czechoslovakia that they ultimately left their refugee camp and returned to the war zone in Bosnia. That decision was shocking to me when I first heard Ena’s story, but so many refugees in Prague — even those who were granted accommodation in private homes, not stuck in camps — are currently making the same choice. Life in the Czech Republic has become significantly more challenging over the past year, not only due to the housing crisis, the brutal 16% inflation rate, or the astronomical price of energy, but also because the country has begun to walk back its support for refugees — material, financial, and emotional. Changes to the Lex Ukrajina law introduced last summer forced many refugees, like Olesya, to begin paying for health insurance out of pocket, and it reduced the amount they could receive in humanitarian aid. More alarmingly, Czech citizens have turned out in droves to protest the government’s continued support for Ukraine, blaming them for the high price of electricity and gas.
That’s one reason I’m developing a new podcast series. War fatigue breeds compassion fatigue. When war ceases to shock, its victims’ problems cease to tug on our emotions. But life for “settled” refugees can be shockingly difficult, too. Stories like Olesya’s don’t often make the local news, but local listeners need to hear them.
Another reason is the stark contrast between Czechs’ compassion for those with whom they can readily identify and their rejection of those with whom they cannot. Universe willing, there will come a time when many of the Ukrainians who fled Russia’s war will be able to return home, or to support themselves and their families in their new homes, take steps towards recovering from the trauma they’ve endured, and begin to prepare for the future. But as the number of forcibly displaced people inches beyond 100 million worldwide, the need to develop more sustainable means of providing support for this vulnerable population continues to grow. One can only hope that Czechs will remember the compassion they extended to their Ukrainian brethren at the start of this war when they respond to new waves of people in need in the future. One can only hope that those of us in media can help make the connection.
I believe narrative audio is a direct route to fostering goodwill for strangers, as well as a widely accessible one. Podcasting, for better or for worse, is a powerful medium for establishing parasocial relationships, which is why one Guardian journalist argued that, post-pandemic, podcasts have “replaced our real friends.” Our favorite shows cater to our instinctual need for connection (why else would this thread in the “Podcasts” subreddit calling for “Podcasts that make you feel like you have friends?” garner 328 comments before being locked?). And the power of narrative to change minds and inspire empathy has been thoroughly researched and well-documented.
Where many existing series on migration and asylum fall short, I believe, is in bridging that us–them divide—in reaching beyond empathy, striving instead for identification. Podcast listeners need to know how their lives overlap with those of refugees, lest the millions of displaced people who now live in their communities remain, in their eyes, nothing but strangers from faraway lands.
Think:
Less grand generalization, more humanizing specifics.
Less explanation, more illustration.
Less pathos, more curiosity.
Less traditional folk music, more contemporary local hits.
Less actor-reads-polished-translation, more tongue-tied-interpreter-tries-to-find-the-right-words-for-a-clever-turn-of-phrase.
Less innocent victim, more quirky/funny/thoughtful/normal/flawed/conflicted/idiosyncratic/altogether human person, who — boom — suddenly has nothing.
As a student of the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program, I was prompted to consider future podcast listeners as a community rather than an audience, and over the course of the 100-day “journey,” my understanding of what that community looked like shifted dramatically. I began to consider the ways in which the series I was creating could itself be the glue that cemented a community of listeners together, by revealing the ways in which they — we — are already bound by commonalities and shared concerns. That community would include natives and foreigners in the Czech Republic, but also curious and engaged listeners elsewhere in Europe who identify with our challenges.
Masha Volynsky, a communications expert and director of the Czech NGO Amiga, put it beautifully when I interviewed her for the series: “In between Brussels and Prague, there’s Berlin. There’s Warsaw. There is even Budapest,” she said. “And I think we forget that there is a way to learn from other people’s mistakes and other people’s wins and not isolate ourselves as much.”
In the final days of the program, hearing about the projects my 34 classmates were undertaking across 19 different countries, I was reminded of Peter Pomerantsev’s essay “Memory in the Age of Impunity.” Pomerantsev argues that, at a time when we’re being bombarded with devastating news from all corners of the world all at once, the task for journalists is “to unearth the interconnecting tendrils of issues, intertwining roots of problems that crisscross the world more intensely than ever.” He calls this work “a new mission for journalism. To work out why an issue in Manila is also about Silicon Valley and about Moscow and about you.”
Anyone can be a refugee. You can be a refugee. It shouldn’t matter if the challenges faced by one group of people could one day become your own. That shouldn’t be a prerequisite for remaining engaged with other people’s struggles. But the unfortunate truth is, it does matter. In order to summon their compassion and sustain their curiosity, listeners need to feel that millions of people fleeing threats to their lives, freedom, and livelihoods are people of whom they do, indeed, know something.
That’s what’s driving me these days. Do get in touch if you want to come along for the ride.
Morgan Childs is an audio journalist and producer based in Prague. www.morgan-childs.com
