Dear Daryna, I can't help but admit that I feel very small right now.

And then your letter reaches me, which tells of so much greatness.

My thoughts began to hide inside him, as if his words could offer me shelter.

I'll have to find my own, though, if I don't want to keep sitting here small and alone.

On the home page of the German news program Tagesschau, there are two focal points next to each other: Ukraine and Iran.

The two countries where we were born, dear Daryna.

In your letter you report how you left your country on February 24th, what an odyssey you have completed in your shoes since then.

You write how important all those items of clothing are to you that you already owned in your home country;

that you cling to them and also to the war like a thread that binds you to your family and your home.

I wish that clothes will soon be just clothes and that this thread will turn into peace again.

I know that the violence and aggression that came to your country with this invasion will not be undone.

But they should stop so that the terror of the future will subside.

One has to remember one way or another.

The first sentence of my book, Reflections of a Barbarian, reads: "My escape is a story, not an experience." The shoes I may have been wearing that day were little more than an accessory.

I had learned to walk in Iran, but that day I was probably mostly carried or driven in a stroller.

I don't know what my parents brought with them to Germany when they fled Iran.

It could have been very little.

I also don't know if any of them are still in their possession.

More than forty years have passed since then.

My grandmother's silk scarf

I own one piece of clothing that represents a connection to my origins for me, even though it has probably never been worn in Iran.

It's one of my grandmother's silk scarves, a black and white patterned one.

She wore it as a headscarf, like other Christian women do.

She never took it off, not even at home or with her family.

She lived in Iraq and Iran, a few decades in Scotland and the last years of her life in the USA and Germany.

However, one would not describe her as a cosmopolitan.

She had no school education to speak of, spoke hardly any English, and did not relate to her environment.

I can't imagine my grandmother walking down the street alone, going for a stroll or meeting up with friends in a café.

Her life was a limited one in a home owned by someone else.

A life for others - their parents and siblings, their husband, their children, their grandchildren.

I always wear her scarf around my neck when I get sick.

I'll wear it until I feel healthy again.

With this ritual I have invented a thread.

Grotesque that it is precisely such a piece of fabric that has symbolized for 43 years how women in Iran can be harassed, oppressed and even murdered with impunity.

When my parents fled, I was saved from living in such circumstances.

I'm left with echoes of my mother tongue and a sense of responsibility that I don't live up to.

Iran is not my country and certainly not my home.

But people do concern me.

That's why I don't contradict when people call me a German-Iranian author.

It's probably little more than an imagined thread, but it creates a bond that means a lot to me.

At the end of your letter you mention the Ukrainian poet Oksana Stomina, whom you met in Brno.

I don't know if you met by chance or not.

I think that thanks to our languages ​​and texts, we are fortunate to always find others who understand without us having to explain everything.

In the last few weeks I have exchanged ideas intensively with people whose family histories lead to Iran and Kurdistan.

These encounters are not about origin, but about solidarity.

They help against the feeling of being small.

I am grateful that I am the addressee of your letter.

He will accompany me for a long time.

Can you send me a photo of your shoes?

your Asal.

Asal Dardan

, born in Tehran in 1978, is a German writer.

Her debut, Observations of a Barbarian, was published by Hoffmann & Campe.

Daryna Gladun's letter to her, which like this reply is part of the project "Write on Ukraine" (https://weiterWRITE.now), appeared in the FAZ on November 22nd.