The Reka holiday village in Lenk im Simmental is naturally a little “off the beaten path”. The train journey from Bern takes 1 hour and 45 minutes. For the holiday village, get off at a small train station just before Lenk – Boden train station.
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From there it is a few minutes’ walk to the houses that are now available for Ukrainian women and their children: far away from the war, in the heart of the Bernese Oberland. Normally, the 300 or so beds of the Swiss travel fund Reka are occupied by holiday guests, the summer would already be fully booked, and next winter almost as well.
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This is what it looks like in summer in Lenk.
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The Reka employees made more than a hundred phone calls. Many guests would have understood the current situation that Reka is making the beds available to the canton of Bern for refugees. “We feel a great deal of solidarity in the Swiss population,” says the head of Reka Holidays, Damian Pfister.
A 50-year-old woman from Ukraine has already arrived. Communicating is difficult, she does not speak English. We still understand each other with a digital translation tool. She comes from the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. The second largest city in the country is being destroyed, people are fleeing, she is finding accommodation in Lenk with her 22-year-old daughter – after an arduous journey.
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Her first impression of the holiday village: “Nice people, all very helpful”. There is peace and quiet here, where she can recover from the long journey via Lemberg, Warsaw and Berlin. So she’s here for the time being.
Reka provides a total of 300 beds for refugees. It is assumed that many children will also come. The infrastructure is suitable for this, even made for it – a playground including a sandbox is right in front of the door, there are little kids to pet, lots of nature and few people who could be disturbed by the noise of children.
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“There are many new tasks ahead of us,” says Damian Pfister, Holiday Manager at Reka. The holiday village has to reschedule in a short time and get ready for the Ukrainian guests. But they are happy to do so – the decision to make the holiday village available to the canton of Bern was made quickly.
But there are still many open questions. More than 30 new arrivals are expected this week alone. “We don’t know in what condition the people come, what their needs are, whether we need interpreters. We have to be flexible,” says Pfister. Soon the holiday village will gradually fill up.
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Not everything is settled financially. On the one hand for the Swiss travel fund itself, explains the holiday director: “But that’s not the priority for us. We want to help unbureaucratically first and take care of the finances later. It is clear that we will invest several hundred thousand francs. But we can afford it, we’ve had a couple of very good years.”
On the other hand, the community of Lenk fears a drop in income, because the refugees don’t pay tourist taxes like tourists do: “We don’t have a solution yet, we have to clarify that with the community and the tourism organization,” says Pfister. The cooperation with the authorities, including the cantonal ones, works very well. And the canton of Bern is the fastest and so far the only one in this matter: no other canton has yet approached the Reka with the question of whether holiday accommodation for refugees could be made available.