A tale of two families
Three generations of Ukrainians who arrived in Austria on March 5, 2022. Three generations of Ukrainians who arrived on on December 27, 2022. Why then vs now? How has it been?
The first of these two families shared very personal stories. We therefore agreed I will write on a no-name, no-photo basis to protect their privacy. The second family was happy to share their first names and a family photo, as you will see below. It was a gift from husband/dad for Svitlana’s 30th birthday. This style of photo session in Ukraine is called “all inclusive” meaning you are loaned the outfits, too.
I meet with Grandmother in a Viennese cake and coffee chain shop, which was still half-empty on a weekday morning. She sits down with a huge smile. She is tiny and petite and elegant in a beige jumper and trousers, and completely surprises me when she tells me her age (66). She doesn’t look a day over 56.
Grandmother has been in Austria with her daughter and grandson since the early days of March. They woke up in a central Ukrainian city on February 24, and immediately went to get money out of the ATM. Grandmother shows me a photo of the line that day. A few days later, they decided to leave, and took an evacuation train. By March 3 they were already in Zakarpattia oblast in western Ukraine.
Grandmother recalls the train journey with horror. 16 people squished into a coupe built for four. The train moved slowly, stopping along the way as air raid signals and other interruptions occurred. Her legs hurt so badly. People were sleeping on the floor of the corridor. She left Ukraine with her daughter, 37, and her grandson, 7. Her daughter’s husband immediately signed up to join the local defence unit (civilian volunteer units). He was supportive of their decision to leave. He dove into his volunteer work 24/7.
At first, the three generations wanted to go somewhere warm. They fantasized over where that might be. They had spent the first days of the war in a cold bomb shelter, and had all gotten sick. When they arrived in Austria, they were first sent to Stadion, where they slept in bunk beds. Grandmother shows me a photo, and frankly it looks much better than any other initial accommodation I have seen in Austria, which is usually fold-out cots. But after a few days at Stadion, they were sent to Wien Messe, which was as awful as it has a reputation for being. She shows me a photo of a huge hall packed with cots.
Grandmother explains grandson got sick, again. He had a very high temperature. Someone called an ambulance. They arrived and simply gave him ibuprofen, but left him there. Someone offered the family housing in Lower Austria. The details are murky, but grandmother believes it was a private individual who suggested they go there. They packed up all their things and went to a remote location in Lower Austria, near to a forest, and next to a motorway, where the nearest store and school were a thirty minute walk away, and the local mayor was there to “welcome” the Ukrainians. This family took one look at the proposed accommodation (moldy, remote, loud) and realised they could not stay. They ran back to Vienna, back to Messe, despite their exhaustion.
They then decided to battle it out at ACV. At this point, mid-March, things were still in total chaos. There were no online appointments. Grandmother tells me “I still have our number. We were number 947.” Ukrainians stood outside in the cold, windy space outside of ACV for hours, sometimes overnight, hoping to get inside and ask for help. When the family of three finally made it inside, the daughter (Mom), burst into tears. Grandmother says she never ever saw her daughter cry like that before. Mom begged a Diakonie representative for housing (at the time Diakonie was the NGO charged with placing refugees in private accommodation offered by Austrians). She explained her son was constantly sick and they needed something in Vienna. They were afraid to go back. After twenty minutes of phone calls, while the family of three waited, the social worker found them an apartment and handed them an address. They were told a taxi would pick them up. The owner of the apartment would pay for the taxi.
They could not believe it.
Soon after, they arrived at a clean two-room apartment in Vienna. The landlord would receive the €300 reimbursed each month by the state, and the family would only be responsible for paying utilities. The utility bill was last year €100 per month. Grandmother is nervous as she tells me about the apartment, because they have not yet signed another six-month contract. I explain the landlord sounds like an exceptionally kind individual, and she probably has nothing to fear. I explain why the short contract is the legal form normally used in these cases.
Grandmother and Mom sign up for German classes. Mom is a particularly devoted student. She does her homework; has already finished A2. Grandmother finds German hard. Grandson is enrolled in first grade in a local school. There are four Ukrainian kids in his class. School is a five minute walk from the apartment. There are Syrian and Serbian kids in the school too. Sometimes the Serbs bully the Ukrainians. Grandson can stay for lunch and after-care until 15:30. How, I ask? Grandmother refers to Mom. Mom manages to do all of this, despite not really speaking English and only starting to learn German. When Mom wants something, she is determined. Nothing can stop her.
Grandmother looks me in the eye and explains: you see, it wasn’t easy with her. She was addicted to drugs for ten years. You cannot imagine the situations she was in, what she did to survive. I didn’t know if we could save her. But one day she had a vision, and she knew she wanted to have a child. She worked that summer picking strawberries in the fields and selling them in the city. The fresh air and the vitamins must have helped her. By fall, she fell pregnant. Her husband knew about her history, and accepted and loves her for all of it.
This was all clearly years ago but grandmother explains like it was yesterday. I realise this is a pain that a parent never forgets. She is so proud and yet fearful. At the end of our conversation I explain we will write this anonymously, as this is an important part of the story. To omit it would be not right, but I want to protect their privacy. She agrees.
It is hard for Mom. She misses her husband dearly. Grandmother explains that for some women it is very hard to be apart for their spouse for a long period of time. Mom would like to go back to Ukraine, now. Grandmother would like to stay in Austria as long as possible. Did you go back at all? I ask. Once, she says. She buried documents in the ground outside her home in a panic when the war started. She needed to unbury them before they would turn rotten. It was scary. She went home at the end of May for only one day. The air raid sirens were awful and triggering.
Grandmother doesn’t sleep well. I tell her about another grandmother from Odesa I met recently at the arrivals center who told me she doesn’t sleep well here in Austria when she sees air raid sirens on her phone for Ukraine.
Mom did meet up once with her husband for three days in Uzhgorod. I say I know a woman who did that and is now about to give birth for the second time. Yes, Grandmother says, I was wondering about that too at the time.
Mom would like to take her son and go back to her apartment in a sleeping district of her Ukrainian city and her husband. She often cries because she misses him so much. Grandmother would like grandson to stay here, but mother and son are inseparable. Mother protects son like a lioness.
Grandmother does not want to go home because home is a house outside of the city she bought in the late 1980s that she still shares with her ex-husband whom she divorced twelve years ago. As the home was bought during marriage, she would have to give him half, and she cannot afford it. So they live side by side, but she finds it very, very difficult. In Ukraine, Grandmother worked in a local cafe.
Grandson is lucky to attend a Ukrainian weekend school which existed before the war started in Vienna but has since expanded to the influx of children who arrived last spring. It takes place inside a historical school in downtown Vienna, and is not free. Grandson’s dad pays for this. He is now a manager of a white goods shop whose business has mostly moved online. When the war started they let 20 managers go, and only hired back two. He was one of the lucky two. A valued employee.
Mom worked in bookkeeping in Ukraine (and she studied in a college — Grandmother points this out — we have this stereotype that people taking drugs stop doing everything but that isn’t really how it works in real life. Some of them manage for years to put on the image of somehow functioning). She was offered a course by AMS which would help her learn bookkeeping in the Austrian system.
Grandmother stresses to me how economically difficult things are in Ukraine right now. It was hard before the war, she says. She pauses in our conversation to take a bite out of two macaroons she has ordered. Chocolate and pistachio. She was too shy to order cake. She said she had always wanted to taste the colourful little treats. Grandmother explains many people from the Donbas moved to central Ukrainian cities, meaning finding work was already a challenge, with supply of labor far outstripping supply of decent jobs. Mom had worked as a bookkeeper for a local shop. But that job had been since moved to Kharkiv. If she goes back, she won’t have a job to go back to. Grandmother looks at me. And you know, she says, things in Ukraine cost almost as much as they do here. You should see the prices. I nod in understanding. So they say.
She then begins to tell me about her own life. This happens organically. I didn’t ask, but I don’t stop the conversation. I am fascinated.
Grandmother was born in 1956 (it was her birthday a few days ago) when her mother was 45 and already had two older children. “My dad was an alcoholic and he killed himself when I was seven.” At the age of seven, Grandmother was sent to a Soviet boarding school 100 kilometres from the town in Cherkassy oblast where she grew up. She lived in the boarding school for ten years and received an education there, seeing her mother only on holidays.
She explains, “I loved my mother very much. She did absolutely the best thing she could for me. She was illiterate, born in 1912, had only a Soviet “Likbez” course. She had no money and could not have helped me with schoolwork. She worked as a cleaner in a hospital.” Her older brother had also been sent to an internat. “Once I begged mother for a dress. It was so expensive. 13 roubles. She saved up and bought it for me. You know in the internat we were all dressed in the same drab clothes, no one had anything special like that…”
Grandmother has a second daughter, the eldest. She took her child, a teenager, and went to Germany with friends. She will stay there for the time being.
Grandmother tells me about her older brother in Ukraine, in Cherkassy oblast where she grew up. He is now 74. His first wife was Chuvash (an ethnic minority in Russia). When they divorced, she took their son and went back to Russia. Grandmother’s brother remarried, and also had a son in that second marriage. Now with mobilization happening on both sides of the border (she tells me about men being stopped while driving and issued draft papers in her home region, after speaking on the phone with a girlfriend a few days ago), her brother sits in horror at the thought that his two adult sons could theoretically be sent by their respective governments to kill each other.
We finish off our melange (she has learned this word in German class and uses it to order) and the conversation turns back to Austria. I mention that medicine is one of the few areas that seems to more or less work. She disagrees. It is hard to get appointments. She has been trying to show an area of skin that needs a biopsy to three or four clinics for months now and getting nowhere. She was dependent on volunteer translators to communicate. She befriended a woman who works for an NGO and agreed to help translate at 8am, but had to be at work by 9am, making appointments stressful (rarely will a doctor actually see you on time, especially when you are using the state insurance program). However, when Grandmother needed to see a psychiatrist, that did happen, and a translator was even provided. She told the doctor she cannot sleep, and was prescribed sleeping pills.
She received dental work. A bridge. I unfortunately have to explain how little is actually covered by Austrian insurance. Dental work can be very expensive. Grandmother was lucky that insurance covered €750 but she still had to pay €250 out of pocket. She isn’t happy with the result. Says she feels discomfort. Thinks the dentists in Ukraine are better.
Grandmother reminisces to the early days when they first arrived. She shows me a photo with huge suitcases. You know what we had in them? she asks. No, I shake my head. Food. Lentils. Beans. We were so scared of being hungry. We dragged them everywhere.
She then shows me the most touching home-made video with words of gratitude in German which Mom made for their landlord. A roll of photos and videos of everything they had been through in 2022 — all the lows and all the highs. It was the most beautiful thing. “It took her a whole day to make it”. I bet. Amazing. It included clips from this flashmob dance Ukrainian women performed in Vienna this summer.
Grandmother tells me proudly how the washing machine broke, and the landlord wasn’t upset, because it was 14 years old, but they decide to buy a new one and install it all by themselves, to show their gratitude, and when the phone rang, to schedule the delivery, Mom managed to speak German all by herself with the delivery service and they were so excited as Grandmother had her telephone Google translate waiting to spring into action but Mom waved it away.
She really hopes they won’t go back just yet. If they leave, where will she live?
The second family of three arrived in Austria just a few days before New Year’s 2023. My tweet is a typo. It was December 27.
I speak with Svitlana by phone. She is now in Pinkafeld, in Burgenland, with her daughters Nastia (8) and Olesia (6).
Why did you choose to come in the middle of winter? I ask. What did you do before then?
“When the war first began, we went to western Ukraine for four months. But it was very expensive. Once it became warm, and that area was relatively safe, we went to our dacha in Kyiv oblast. It is in the south, so not the direction of Bucha and those areas. It was fine for the summer, but you cannot live there in the winter. The dacha is not equipped for winter.”
So the family returned back to Kyiv, where they live in an apartment on the 14th floor. When the electricity was cut from time to time, that meant walking 14 floors with small children, and not being able to cook on the electric stove. The air raid sirens scared the girls. Svitlana spoke with her godmother, who was already in Pinkafeld, living in private accommodation, and had searched for a place for the family to stay. So Svitlana and her girls, and Svetlana’s mother, who joined too, did not arrive without a destination. This is such an important point, because it is those who arrive not knowing where to go and not having anyone locally waiting for them, to help, who really suffer in Austria’s system.
The godmother helped find a private apartment which the family could rent for €750 per month. €256 per month they would be reimbursed by Burgenland (the Austrian state) for Svitlana and her girls, another €128 for the grandmother (she counts as a separate individual). For food, they receive 2 x €213 + 2 x €96 = €608. So in total they receive €1002 - €750 rent = €252 per month for a family of four (grandmother, mother, two daughters) to live on. Svitlana says they are managing. She does not complain. Not at all. They do dig into savings, and they have applied for the Familienbeihilfe (child credit), but that will take longer to be processed and for payments two arrive. She had to wait for the blue cards to arrive in order to apply. Those only arrived recently. She mailed in her application and hopes it will be processed one day soon.
The family go to Oberwart on Saturdays to collect groceries from the Red Cross. You pay €2 per bag. The produce isn’t great, sometimes expired, but it is cheap and available every week. Usually someone with a car drives them.
Svitlana does attend a German class which runs until 2pm and she is only able to attend because her mother is with her and can pick up the girls from school. The girls were placed in 1st and 3rd grade in an “integration” classes with other kids, including kids from Syria. Once they have learned some German, they will be moved to an “Austrian” class. The girls do not stay for afternoons nor lunch at school because that would cost €100 per month each. In Ukraine, they were home-schooled.
Svitlana talks about maybe going home at the end of spring, maybe if they can go to the dacha again for summer, maybe then come back again next winter. In my mind I am thinking you were so lucky to find an apartment that didn’t require any deposit that you can somehow afford, that may not happen twice. They did have to have a scan for tuberculosis, even the girls! (This is common practice I learned this year for refugees in Austria to be required to be screened for TB, even children, which of course upsets many parents because it involves a chest x-ray. I tried to google the relevant law and could not find it, but did find this interesting post.).
Svitlana only speaks a little English. She is happy in Pinkafeld. It is calm, peaceful, she is very grateful to be living without air raid sirens and for the help with rent. Her daughters were afraid in Ukraine. Having her godmother local, I have the impression Svitlana had a soft landing. There are many Ukrainians in Pinkafeld, and she has no major complaints. She says the locals greet them and are friendly.
I share these stories side by side because they represent the change that took place over the past year. In spring there was total panic and a huge wave of refugees. Systems were not in place to respond swiftly. That steady flow westwards continued throughout the summer, but slowed by fall, and now in winter, Ukrainians are still arriving, but there is usually a backstory. Something went wrong, they lost their housing, they decided to come now because X. Clearly millions of Ukrainians have adjusted to daily life in war-time Ukraine, and they also no longer see Europe or the EU through rose-colored glasses.
I understand Grandmother does not want to go home, wants her grandson to finish the school year. I understand Mom misses her husband dearly. I understand Svetlana’s decision in the context of the relatively soft landing she enjoyed plus her mother came along so she is not devoid of adult company. Both of these stories are far more positive than many I could share. But I share them side by side to illustrate the march of time. And the one thing both families have in common — neither has any idea what the future will bring. Husbands are back in Ukraine, waiting, alone.
More than enough for today, but very briefly, I was my honor and pleasure to join Mriya Report live for nearly two hours today! Thank you all so much for having me and letting me talk a bit about Cards for Ukraine and the situation here in Austria for Ukrainians.
I also helped the dorm residents with getting their letter printed in German. If you missed yesterday’s post, it is here. Do you have stamps and envelopes, I ask, cautiously. No, they reply. Ok, I’ll bring you those, too.
Thank you so much for reading and for your continued support. It really does take a global village.