My husband’s parents were Second World War refugees, relocating Afghans is a complicated project

The pictures of desperate people crammed into a sewage channel at Kabul airport are now starting to be replaced by happier pictures of families arriving into the UK, relieved to be alive and safe.

Local councils and charities have been overwhelmed with contributions. Some of the necessary accommodation has already been found. The UK’s exit from Afghanistan may have been ignominious, but this country can once again bask in its reputation for generosity towards those in need. Operation Warm Welcome – who invents these names? – is in full swing.

Every now and again someone ventures a warning. Generosity can wear off once the immediate crisis leaves the news. How come accommodation for large families is suddenly available, when some have been on the social housing lists for years? Where are the school places going to come from? People are waiting three weeks to see a GP; isn’t the NHS already stretched?

Different social mores – attitudes towards women and simple unfamiliarity with how things are done – can quickly spur local tensions, which may then be compounded by language differences. The UK is regarded as a relatively tolerant place, but our efforts to integrate newcomers can look inconsistent and amateurish compared with those of, say, Germany or France.

But it is no time to be churlish. And none of this is a reason to shrink the welcome mat. It is rather for the UK to do better. Life for newly arrived refugees needs to be made much more predictable, with more safeguards and help than currently exist. Provision of English teaching in particular needs to a lot better and more accessible than it currently is, which will take political determination – and money.

But the difficulties are not, and will never only be, on our side, the side of the receiving country. The biggest challenge by far is for the refugees themselves. A place of safety may be the first priority, but what happens next is often neglected. As I watched those crowds pressing to leave on the last planes from Kabul, I could not help wondering if anyone would regret their decision, how many had been driven to join the exodus by the panic swirling all around – at times compounded, or so I felt, by the murderous forecasts for Afghanistan’s future then dominating the western media – and how many might, in time, try to wend their way unhappily back, they and their families irretrievably broken.

Such thoughts came not from the darker recesses of imagination or the literary chronicles of the time – though both certainly made their contribution. They came rather from what I learned of the experience of my late husband, the child of Second World War refugees, whose story was that of millions displaced forever from their homelands by the fighting that ravaged the continent of Europe.

His parents were academic chemists, born in Ukraine as citizens of the Russian empire. They experienced the Bolshevik revolution in their teens, famine and Joseph Stalin’s repressions in their late twenties, and German occupation in their thirties, before being taken to the Sudetenland as forced labour. When their factory was bombed out, they walked west, ending up at a refugee camp in the US zone of occupation near Frankfurt. After two years, and now with a baby son, they arrived in the United States, sponsored by relatives who had fled communism a generation before.

On the surface, their emigration might be seen as a success. The family’s sponsor had become a successful architect in New York. My husband’s father subsequently became an employee of the US federal government; his mother, a university lecturer. But that is only a small part of the story.

It disregards the many years they lived near the breadline, working in menial and dangerous jobs; the time they spent on a smallholding in New England, trying to shut out the world. It disregards the tensions between the penniless fugitives and their prosperous sponsors, who pressed their newly arrived family to support themselves. It disregards the conflicts between his father, who wanted to learn English and better himself in the city, and his mother, who wanted nothing to do with the new country and to replicate a rural Russian life, in the hope of one day returning (although there was nothing to return to).

It disregards the bitter break-up of their marriage, their son torn between not just two people, but two sets of aspirations. It disregards the scars left by their experience of war – his father, like many refugees of that era, slept with an axe by the bed; they both witnessed the aftermath of the carpet-bombing of Dresden. There are studies – of Holocaust survivors and refugees – showing that psychological harm can pass to the next generation.

And, of course, it cannot but disregard what other courses there might have been. For them, leaving their country was not a choice; returning “home” could have meant death or the labour camp, and most of that part of Ukraine had anyway been devastated by war. It also has to be said that to be sponsored to settle in the United States within two years of the war’s end can be seen as a vastly better fate than many faced.

Even so, even for two people with degree-level qualifications, with a basic safety-net provided by relatives, people who were reasonably self-reliant and shared a European heritage with so many Americans – even so, they were equivocal about emigration. The rigours of having to make a new start in mid-life, learn a new language and new ways of doing things, often seemed a challenge too far. The soonest for most people it comes good is with the next generation – which is often why those with a choice say they decided to leave their native land – and even then a legacy of insecurity may remain.

All this went through my mind as I watched the chaotic rush to Kabul airport and the smiling reception organised in halls across the UK. It is hard enough for those with family, an education and a cultural affinity to succeed in their new country. For those without any of this – and that will be as true of those fleeing Afghanistan, as it has been of previous arrivals from other lands – even adjustment, let alone success, could prove elusive.

As hosts, I fear we may be too ready to patronise today’s refugees as the fortunate beneficiaries of safety and freedom, entering a country where they will live happily ever after. Some will. But for many, perhaps most, the experience will be a lot more complicated than the halo that currently surrounds Operation Warm Welcome might suggest.