COMMUNITY SERVICE
Safe haven Noted German attorney and his wife extend helping hands to war refugees By Tom Kirvan
A Ukrainian refugee, 10-year-old Lena has found a safe and happy home in Germany thanks to the Brödermann family, which includes a four-legged friend named Whisky. Lena also brought along her own dog, Bycei, from the Ukraine.
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THE PRIMERUS PARADIGM
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n late February, German lawyer Dr. Eckart Brödermann and his wife, Silke, began an unexpected odyssey that figures to change – and enrich – their lives forever. It came in the wake of three funerals that the couple attended over the span of a week, including a memorial service for a “professor friend at age 55 with whom I taught for years” at the University of Hamburg in the northern region of Germany, according to Brödermann. The seeds for their trip were sewn while en route to the third funeral when the gravity of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine hit home. “We were informed that the Ukrainian family of our son’s girlfriend was suddenly fleeing for their lives, joining thousands of other war refugees seeking safety at the borders of neighboring countries,” Brödermann indicated in a Zoom interview March 14. “On the way from the cemetery to the funeral reception, we decided to change gears and to leave that same night for Leipzig in the Southeast,” said Brödermann of the four-hour drive to the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. “The next day we drove another 14 hours via Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest to the Hungarian-Ukrainian border, which was less crowded than the Polish border.” It was there, at a crossing in which guards let cars pass through at an agonizingly slow pace of one every 20 minutes, that the Brödermanns began providing a safe haven for five Ukrainian refugees, including a mother, three children, and an aunt. “We welcomed our new family at the border at midnight,” Brödermann said of the homecoming of sorts. “After a short night in a hotel where we had pre-