Patricia Nicol

I HEARD a young Ukrainian, Naliia describe her ‘tough past month’ recently. ‘I’ve lost my hair, I’ve lost my home; the village where I spent my childhood has been completely destroyed,’ she voice-mailed the Invaded podcast.

You can see it on your screens, hear and read vivid accounts, yet it is still hard to grasp the enormity of this humanitarian plight: that in Europe, more than five million people, mostly women and children, have fled a country in the past two months, while millions more have been uprooted internally.

The rediscovered 1938 novel The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz captures, terrifyingly, having to leave your home and life behind in a hurry.

Its most desperate aspect is that its Jewish protagonist, Berliner businessman Otto Silbermann, is too late leaving Nazi Germany.

The novel is like a John Buchan thriller rewritten by Franz Kafka. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, Silbermann criss-crosses Germany, but nowhere will give him refuge; his homeland has become a prison.

Tomas and Tereza, the central couple of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, do manage to flee their homeland after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. But safe in exile in Zurich, Switzerland, they feel restless and rootless. The pull to return home proves irresistible.

Marina Lewycka’s A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian, although a comic novel, does explore how the trauma of exile and immigration can reverberate across generations.

In modern Britain, two estranged sisters, Vera and Nadia, unite in their antipathy for their widowed father Nikolai’s much younger new wife, Valentina. Nikolai came to the UK as a refugee after World War II. Valentina is part of a post-Soviet exodus.

I have chosen books that describe a European experience of fleeing war and seeking refuge.

There are others, such as The Kite Runner, The Beekeeper Of Aleppo and East West Street, that all too vividly convey the perilous lives led by migrants fleeing war. And remind us to show compassion.