The sounds are sometimes sad, sometimes cheerful, dancing, floating through the old ballroom, past the head-high wooden frames on which nets of thin cords are stretched.

A historic bourgeois palace on the market square of Lemberg (Lviv).

Young Ukrainians stand close together and knot strips of dark fabric into the weave, their fingers always following the same movements, attentive to every detail.

The raw material comes in sacks from the ground floor, where the elders sit in a library and use their scissors to cut curtains and donated clothes into narrow strips.

Alexander Haneke

Editor in Politics.

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The nets are made of nylon cords in a narrow passage.

They are camouflage blankets designed to protect Ukrainian soldiers from attacks by the invading Russian army.

Upstairs, in a corner of the ballroom, at a long-detuned Ukraina piano, sits Antonii Baryshevskyi, with Aleksey Semenenko on the violin next to him.

Young Semenenko shouldn't even be here.

That may be true for many in Lviv, but especially so for Semenenko.

At the age of 33 he is already a professor of violin at the renowned Folkwang University in Essen and has performed in many of the world's major concert halls.

But on the eve of the war, fate had brought him to Kyiv, to the Philharmonic.

As an encore he played Tchaikovsky of all things, the "Sérénade mélancolique".

"That was a sign," he says.

The bright beginning that slides into a thoughtful mourning.

The next morning the first rockets fell on Ukraine and the peace was over.

Even the German passport didn't help

He was lucky, says Semenenko.

At first he thought it would be over quickly, but then the bitter seriousness of the situation became apparent.

He snagged a ticket on one of the few westbound trains and quickly made it to Lemberg.

It just didn't go any further for him here.

Because Semenenko, who was born in Odessa, still has a Ukrainian passport.

And as a man of military age, he has not been allowed to leave the country since the general mobilization.

Twice he went to the border, without success.

On the second attempt, even with a German passport, which his wife got for him in Cologne within a day.

If need be, even the mills of the German administration grind fast.

"Everything was pulled, right up to the mayor's office." His naturalization had actually been long since the Cologne authorities were just waiting for the Ukraine to release him from his citizenship.

Semenenko also saw no reason to rush, and why should he.

Until February 24th.

But even the German passport didn't help him.

Semenenko is still Ukrainian and thus subject to martial law.

Now his wife is waiting on the Polish side for something to happen.

Even Anne-Sophie Mutter and Daniel Barenboim were involved, but it was all to no avail.