Portraits of War: Emmanuelle
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Illustration by Emily Sweetman
This is the fifth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.
By Jacob Sweetman:
Emmanuelle Chaze says she'll never forget the night of the 24th of February when she got the call from French national radio.
'Be ready,' they said. 'It has happened'.
She'd been at the Munich security conference the week before, she'd heard both the platitudes and the pleas for help. Chaze already knew the invasion of Ukraine was a fait accompli, but still.
“My immediate thought,” she tells me, “was about the people that would be displaced.”
People say to her all the time that because of her years of study into the lives of the Huguenots - persecuted and driven out of Catholic France to scatter themselves across Europe, putting down roots that persist to this day – it makes sense that Chaze spends her professional career reporting on migration, on refugees, on the human stories of degradation and fear that take place at international borders during all too unexceptional times.
Chaze catalogues those spaces where war spreads out its wings, the hinterlands of our most invidious, inhuman actions. Though she says any link to her academic past is coincidental.
She grew up in France, but close to Germany. She speaks several languages and is learning more. They come easily to her, as if disregarding the lines drawn on maps supposed to keep us all apart. And maybe it is just another coincidence, but she does go on to say that, actually,
“I don't really think anything happens just by chance.”
She says all this in the cafe in the swollen, gilded belly of Dussmann's Kulturhaus, as officious waiters fuss around inadequately sized tables and the goldfish swim placidly in the blue tiled pond behind us. We are at the heart of the Friedrichstadt, part of Berlin founded by the Huguenots.
We are also only a stone's throw from the Tränenpalast, the former crossing point between what were once called East and West Berlin.
Coincidence or not, there is at least a certain synchronicity here.
Last year, Emmanuelle Chaze stepped on board a boat for the first time in her life to set sail into the Mediterranean for seven weeks to report on the crew's desperate efforts at rescuing refugees cast out to sea. She faced tragedy on that boat, as she also saw occasional moments of the best of humanity. She got to know kids, eight, nine year olds, pulled from the sea; they played with her camera, they smiled into its lens.
So she was ready, mentally, to go to the Polish / Ukrainian border when the call came on the 24th.
But she took a few days to prepare before heading for Hrebenne. She needed time to find out what was really going on. She needed to make sure she had security, sorting out the practicalities, like a hotel far enough away so she didn't use up nearer rooms necessary for refugees or volunteers. But she was still one of the first there, early enough to witness everything falling into place, seeing the evolution of the border town as the crisis developed
The first report she made was before she'd even reached the checkpoint. Her fixer (though she says she hates the term) thought she was mad.
She had five minutes until she was live, the feed already running in her ears. She simply put up her tripod and started narrating the scene; a usually busy motorway almost empty; a few parked buses in the distance at the Ukrainian border; the bitter cold, it was minus 15; the people who had made it this far with bowed backs, sunken faces and lowered heads, looking, as she said on live TV, completely exhausted.
She says that she's not seen anything like it before, it was like a film. It was eerie, frightening.
“People were coming one after the other, and they were looking at their phones for directions, like you would in a city when you're a tourist. But they all looked like they hadn't slept for days. And I know those people, because I've been on other borders...”
She's told the stories of people in Calais and Lesbos, too, places at the very edges of other conflicts.
“...And seeing them there in that otherwise fairytale like scenery is strange. Western Poland is really pretty,” she says, trying her best to describe images so discordant that they only really made sense as she slowly talked us through them.
She didn't do any interviews with refugees to camera at all that day. She couldn't do it to the people coming across. There's a time and a place, she says, even if it would have made better news. So she worked, she tried to keep warm. She tried to keep her equipment functioning.
Talking about the seven weeks on the boat - an experience that she says changed her life forever - she mentions the camaraderie of the crew. They were professionals, honest and blunt, as they have to be, because they have to trust each other, their lives depend on it, even if they can't always get along. And she talks similarly of bonds between fellow journalists whose silent understanding is forged through a common experience most of us could never comprehend.
That of a border during wartime.
After coming back from Hrebenne she spent a few days back at home in Berlin, before heading back, this time to Medyca. She wasn't alone. All sorts of people are drawn to these weird, tragic places.
There are, at first, local, then national then international TV channels, elbows out, vying for position. Different newsrooms wanting different stories for different audiences. There are volunteers, well wishers, fixers, locals too.
There are thrill seekers and amateurs trying to make their names with footage who the serious journalists won't mix with because they are unprofessional and take risks that no-one should, and who the serious newsrooms won't touch any more, not with a bargepole.
Then there are the profusion of well-meaning incompetents, bogged down in the mires of their own bureaucracy. NGOs like the UNHCR who had to apologise for being late to Medyca, but whose gazebos sprung up like mushrooms after the last frost, that will stay there for months now, years maybe, as the border situation becomes normalised like so many others around the world.
Then there are the refugees themselves, different movements of different people, arriving in stages, sometimes according to status, sometimes to chance, and at others to the realities of the war itself.
She talks about the first groups often to arrive. In some ways they are the lucky ones.
“So at first there is the relief, 'we are safe'. But then as soon as they get some rest and a shower, proper clothes, they realise that now with that comes the deep humiliation that you depend on someone else... Nobody wants to be a refugee.”
This is why, she says, people are already returning to Ukraine in ever greater numbers.
She also met young men in their early 20's who'd been living in Poland, on their way back into Ukraine to fight the Russians, noting that this was one of the toughest, most moving encounters she had out there. They were at least well prepared, which cheered her slightly, but not entirely.
For they also knew they were probably going back to die.
She says the people who are drawn towards the borders are also not always altruistic. Some will always see opportunities to exploit other people's misery, like the human traffickers, vultures, circling. She fails to hide her disgust.
Chaze works all the time, and it’s only afterwards, when she goes home, that she can begin to try and sort out things in her head. She says she'll have to 'try to tie herself down', only half jokingly, because the clashing of images, of feelings, of emotions, and of helplessness come up against her impossible drive to work, work, work.
After she got off the boat, people thought that she'd go mad during the two week quarantine in Sicily, but they'd missed the point that this was necessary, just as her conversations with other journalists on her return from the Ukrainian / Polish border with other journalists were. She needed to decompress, to process everything she had seen, to put things in some kind of an order.
The first thing I asked when I got in touch originally, was how she deals with what she's seen, how it doesn't make her tear her hair out, how she doesn't end up punching the walls or crying in the streets.
She answered that she was actually asking herself the same question at the time, but she still didn't know, really.
“I just do what I do,” she says as if it's the easiest thing in the world.
“You know everybody was so shocked by the pictures [of Mariupol] over the weekend - and they are absolutely shocking - but if people are surprised, I wonder what they imagine happens during wars. Because the sufferings of the Ukrainians are the sufferings of the Syrians that we could see happening for years if we opened our eyes. So now, just because it happens on the continent more people are touched and are receptive.
“But a war is a war,” she continues. “It's atrocious. Innocents die. A few days ago there was a bombing in Idlib in Syria, and the father could only recognise his child from the shoes he was wearing. This is happening right now, and its always happened and unfortunately always will because we aren't changing.”
I say that this is where she comes in. This is where she makes a difference, where she is important, because no-one else is telling these stories. She disagrees, though.
“None of us is irreplaceable,” she says.
***
Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here
Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here
