A month ago, Jamala was on the Ukrainian jury that helped select this year's candidate for the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in the national preliminary round.
Peter Philipp Schmitt
Editor in the department "Germany and the World".
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A good ten days ago, the 2016 ESC winner spoke out on her Instagram account for the second-placed band Kalush Orchestra in the preliminary round, because the actual winner Alina Pash had withdrawn her participation after it became known that she was from Russia apparently visited occupied Crimea illegally.
Just hours later, like so many of her compatriots, Jamala was torn from her usual life.
The singer, whose real name is Sussana Jamaladinova, left Kyiv with her two small children after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and fled west.
“We spent almost four days in the car without any food, which, being in shock, nobody seemed to even think about.
Two kilometers in four hours - that's about what we moved," she wrote on Instagram (our picture).
"When strangers come / They come to your house / They kill you all / And say / We are not to blame / No guilt." This is how her song "1944" begins, with which she won the ESC eight years ago;
she had written it after the Russians conquered Crimea in 2014.
The song is about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars by Josef Stalin.
One of the victims at the time was Jamala's great-grandmother.
Taking to Instagram, she explores her feelings then and now, writing that she never imagined the events of World War II would just become reality again, "not the past."
The thirty-eight-year-old has been with her sister in Istanbul with her children for a few days.
Her husband Bekir Suleimanov stayed in Kyiv.
This Friday evening, Jamala will appear at the German preliminary round "Germany 12 points", which will now be broadcast live on the first program from 9 p.m. and not only in the third program of the ARD.
At 8:15 p.m., Erste also broadcasts the special program “Solidarity with Ukraine”.
You can find out more about the Eurovision Song Contest here