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“When strangers come… They come to your house, they kill you all… Where is your heart? Humanity rises, you think you are gods, but everyone dies. It could be the diary of any Ukrainian in the last week, but it is a stanza of '1944', the winning song of Eurovision in 2016. In the 40s she was deported from Crimea by the Stalin regime, along with her five daughters, while her husband fought against the Nazis in the ranks of the Red Army in World War II.
This is years after raising the glass microphone, Jamala has performed '1944', but far from normal.
Excited, Ukrainian flag in hand, the artist has reappeared in the national preselection of Germany singing a song that today, after the invasion, has changed its meaning.
After the invasion of Ukraine, the artist fled the country with her children, leaving her husband to fight on the front lines, and today, like hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, she is one more refugee in a city that is not hers. An exodus to Istanbul that she has narrated through social networks, where she has assured that her song "unfortunately" has acquired a new meaning for her. “On the 24th in the evening we left Kiev with the children. We spent four days in the car making unexpected stops and without food”, she recounted in the first person when she began to flee from her.
“What is happening in Ukraine is not a crisis. It is not a military operation. It is a military escalation without rules. Today, Russia has threatened the whole world. I ask all the European countries to unite against this aggression, as the Ukrainians are doing in my country”, he has written these last hours in a post in which he has explained that everything raised in the national Eurovision pre-selections of Germany and Romania It will go to help the Ukrainian Army.
"I want the world to know the evil that has attacked us," he has sentenced.
'1944', a winning song with controversy
Despite the fact that Eurovision does not have a political character, and that is how its rules are based, the truth is that Jamala's participation in the contest was not without controversy. '1944' talks about her family, about her great-grandmother who, like almost 200.000 Tatars accused of collaborating with Nazi Germany in World War II, was expelled to Central Asia.
In the interviews prior to the 2016 contest, Jamala even spoke of Crimea - annexed by Russia two years earlier - and in one granted to 'The Guardian', she asserted that "the Tatars live in occupied territory." These words, along with the lyrics of the song, caused Russia to accuse Ukraine of using the contest to attack them and of making political use of Eurovision.
Faced with the accusations, Jamala always maintained that her song did not speak of any specific political scene but of the history of her family, with which she wanted to "free herself from the horror and pay tribute to thousands of Tatars."
“My family was locked in a freight car, like animals. Without water and without food”, narrated the artist. "My great-grandmother's body was thrown from a truck like garbage," Jamala recorded before performing in the Eurovision grand final.
Despite the protests, Eurovision considered that the lyrics, which contain stanzas in Tartar that the artist herself said are phrases she has heard in her family ("I couldn't spend my youth there because you took my peace away from me"), was not from political character and allowed Ukraine to participate in the contest.
