A woman from a destroyed Ukrainian city writes dozens of resumes.
She lives in Germany with her old mother, a cat who has digestive problems, and no hope of returning to Ukraine. She lives as if she is ashamed of having survived in her small Ukrainian town and having left the war for another country.
Most of all, she would like to return to her home, but her city has been completely destroyed by the Russians, and there is no more life in it. A woman with an elderly mother and a cat with PTSD is trying to survive in Germany.
To have even a small chance, she needs to cling to something. A woman writes a resume to different companies, but they don’t hire her anywhere. Even for cleaning work.
Potential employers do not answer her. It's like she's an invisible person whose resume is written in invisible ink.
She recently saw an advertisement for a job at a laundry service and asked me to tweak her resume.
“You’re a journalist and you know what you need to write. I’m probably doing something wrong,” she said and gave me a piece of paper in an envelope, in which there was not a resume written by hand, but a cry from the heart.
I read it and I was sad. It's like I ate a whole bar of dark chocolate. Even a tiny piece of this chocolate makes me cough.
When she gave me this envelope, she said that she no longer has the strength to write, she doesn’t know how to do it, and when she just starts thinking about a new resume, her right hand starts to hurt like crazy.
“I guess it's because I'm a loser?”
She worked as an accountant in her small town and was used to numbers. She liked to sit in silence in a tiny office, from the window of which she could see the roof of a neighboring store, where she bought groceries for herself and her mother, and food for the cat twice a week.
The cat then didn’t scream at night and didn’t shit anywhere. He was not afraid of loud noises and did not hide under the bed during a normal thunderstorm. He was calm, fat and purring.
“It’s not that I was the happiest person in the world, but I lived and I had at least some small joys. And now I have nothing. I don’t even need myself.”
Her family was three times larger, but when the Russians shelled the city, they killed her sister, niece and brother-in-law. She and her mother survived, escaped the war and are now trying to survive in a foreign country.
Once she asked: “Why do you think my mother and I stayed here? This is some kind of wrong choice.”
I didn’t even understand right away: “Where did they stay? Whose choice?”
“Well, here on earth.”
I didn’t know how to answer such questions before, and even more so now.
So, I read her resume and understood why they weren’t answering her. I quote it without her name and the name of the city where she now lives.
“Hello, dear employers!
My name is K.V. I live in the city… I came to Germany from Ukraine. My dream is to find a good job.
I understand that with an A2 level of German, middle age and lack of hard physical labor skills, I won’t find a good and highly paid job, but I want to find one that is at least not too hard for me.
Previously, before the war in Ukraine, I had never worked physically, only with my mother on the plot where we grew potatoes and tomatoes. We didn't sell them. They grew it for their family. We don't have a family now. And there is nothing. There is no site and no city. Previously, I always worked with numbers. I am an accountant by profession. But in Germany they don’t hire me for such a good job because of my poor German. I also sometimes brake a lot after a concussion.
I don’t want to deceive you and write that all my life I dreamed of working in a laundry. I find this work very hard and exhausting. Besides, I’m overweight and clumsy, so I’m unlikely to do everything quickly.
But maybe over time I'll speed up. I promise I will try my best.
Of course, in my resume I must write that I am young, active, athletic, and love hard physical work, and thereby interest you. Smart people advised me this way. But I know that when I come to the interview, you will see everything for yourself and think that I am a liar. And I don’t want to deceive or disappoint anyone.
That's why I write it as it is.
The most positive trait of my character is that I am calm, talkative and never shout. And here I’m almost always silent. Because I know few words and am embarrassed to speak German.
I hope that your job does not require language skills at level B2. The washing machine doesn't care what language I speak to it.
If you are interested in my resume, I will wait for a response to this email address…
With great friendly greetings, K.V.”
I completely rewrote my resume and wrote a completely different text. I hope they finally answer her and invite her for an interview, but, you know, for some reason this makes it even harder for me.
I imagine how this short, plump woman with a sad smile, as if she is always apologizing, will go out of her way to show people who do not care at all about her pain and fears and for whom she is just a convenient and cheap labor force that she knows how to work well and she still has a lot of strength left to survive in this country.
And at home she won’t even be able to cry, so as not to upset her old mother, who left her alone in the whole world.
Of course, this is not a tragedy. This is our reality. And there are many like her. People whose lives and destinies were destroyed and crushed by Russian aggression. Those people who turned out to be of no use to anyone, who lost their very tiny, invisible to others, happiness.
Nobody would have ever known about this woman if it weren’t for this resume that she brought to me to redo.
I wrote her another option in 10 minutes. And she was so happy, as if I had rewritten her whole life and now her little happiness would return to her.
It’s a pity that I can’t write as well as she thinks of me.
And in the photo it’s me. So you don't forget what I look like.
Source: Nadiya Sukhorukova / Facebook
