WE MET AS STRANGERS AND LEFT AS FRIENDS: A LETTER FROM THE YOUTH4PEACE SUMMIT IN BERLIN What is peace? Is it the absence of war? The feeling of happiness and calm? Is it hope? 80 young people from 26 different countries came together in Berlin to share personal experiences about war and peace. And I, a Ukrainian studying in Poland, was one of them.
I'm not going to retell the entire week-long marathon – leave it for official reports. Instead, I would like to share what really resonated with me: meaningful conversations, late-night walks, and the laughter that suddenly brought everyone together. When I first arrived at the Youth4Peace event, everything felt like a tangled mess. I felt like I was inside a big ball of yarn, lost in questions, “What is your name?” or “Where are you from?”. Each of us tried to pull one stripe to sort it out and to under- stand each other better - threads of names, faces, questions, languages, memories… But often, the more we pulled, the tighter it became.
found each other in the loops and crossings - not despite them, but because of them. We shared emotions, stories, and activities. Small-talk ques- tions somehow transformed into deep “how do you feel?” acts of care. The whole event was supposed to be about youth participation and peace or war experiences, but instead it was more about sharing views and ideas. For some of us, who experienced life in a war zone, it was a great platform to share and to be heard. Every day, the program was intense. We had a chance to visit a commemorative event of 80 years since the end of World War II in the Bundestag. Many politicians visited us during the week and inspired us to create meaningful final messages. Also, we were honoured to be the first visitors to the newly elected German Chancellor’s office. We had a unique opportunity to sit face-to-face and ask questions that bothered us and receive direct answers. Friedrich Merz told us about his plans for engaging youth in global politics and how to engage young people in political debates. As people from different backgrounds, we asked questions about some issues from our home countries. The Chancellor, for example, promised to “support Ukraine until its victory” or admitted that far-right rising is a big threat to European democracy. Also, he promised to do everything possible to solve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. During our visit to the Sachsenhausen Memorial, it was especially difficult to listen to a contempo- rary witness, the Warsaw insurgent and survivor of Auschwitz Bogdan Bartnikowski. For me, the pain that you could hear in his voice and his stories of the past could easily break any person, but not him. I was amazed by his faith in humanity and human kindness despite everything. He said, “I believe in the best, because I survived, we survived”.
You’d pull on one string - a conversation over coffee, a controversial opinion regarding AI videos or political dangers in our countries - and five others would tighten around it. Nothing was linear or simple. We were inside of a knot and we muddled even more. Day after day, workshop after workshop, late- night talk after late-night talk, we stopped trying to sort it out. The tangle became familiar. We
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