Photo at FADEL SENNA / AFP
I would like to be able to say that these two girls, lying on their luggage at Kramatorsk Central Station before leaving the city, stop on platforms 9 and ¾. So he seems to point to the plastic bag next to the water tank. Take a good look: there is an indication of the magic track invisible to the eyes of “Muggles” – that is, to the eyes of people without magical powers.
Unfortunately, the platform is not that, it is precisely a platform of the central station of Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, a city from which people are fleeing en masse because it risks becoming hell soon. Thousands of people leave every day. There is no platform 9 and ¾ for any of them. And I look again at this photograph, and I look at that blanket, which unfortunately is not the Invisibility Cloak, the cloak that – in the world of Harry Potter – protects from the worst.
And the more I look at it the more I think of the stupidity of those who risk comparisons on the alleged advantage, as children, of living under a dictatorship over living under a war. But it’s Muggle reasoning, or worse, a lot worse. People without magic.
“Feel pity for the living – we read in a page of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – and especially for those who live without love”.