A group of 40 Ukrainian children have started their first day of school in Berlin only weeks after fleeing the war at home.
Amelia, a 7-year-old from Ukraine, went viral after a video showed her singing “Let It Go” in a bomb shelter. Over the weekend, she sang the Ukrainian national anthem for a relief concert in Poland.BERLIN -- Ukrainian refugee Mariia Kerashchenko tightly clasped the hands of her two children as she walked them through the courtyard of a seedy Berlin building, up a graffiti-covered stairway, and into a modern, sunlit classroom.
“It gets me emotional when I see all the help and solidarity here,” the 30-year-old Kerashchenko, from Vinnytsia in central Ukraine, told The Associated Press, her eyes welling with tears. The children nervously clutched their new exercise books, sharpened pencils and erasers as their new teachers welcomed them in Ukrainian on the third floor of the former factory. They will follow their curriculum from back home and also take German language classes. The three hours of school each weekday will be followed by activities such as playacting, painting or handicrafts.
The teachers will be paid 500 euros per month in donations until they have work permits and can be officially hired. They started raising funds and arranged with the Berlin youth support program Arche — “ark” in English — to take over the sponsorship for the classes. They got an offer from online search engine Ecosia to use the rent-free rooms in Berlin's immigrant neighborhood of Wedding and quickly connected via Telegram with Ukrainian mothers who had recently arrived in Berlin.
Up to 10,000 refugees have been arriving by train daily in Berlin since the start of the war, and thousands more have come by car. Many are staying at shelters in the city's convention center and at a former airport, while others are with relatives who immigrated years ago and belong to a 300,000-member Ukrainian diaspora.
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