Anzhelika & daughters
The fifth in a series of twelve days of Christmas. Personal stories by Ukrainians now in Austria. In their own words.
Anzhelika offers to meet me in Vienna, even though I see her address is in Mattersburg, Burgenland. Are you sure, I ask? Yes, she insists. We meet on Sunday at a busy cafe Vienna’s central train station, a place which I will always associate first and foremost with this horrible war, and the collective pain we saw coming through there last spring.
Anzhelika speaks perfect English, and I am a bit taken aback. I have yet to conduct an interview in English. I am used to speaking Russian so the tables next to us don’t understand. Her English is excellent. I am truly shocked when she tells me later on she has never actually been to an English-speaking country.
Anzhelika’s story starts in 1991, when she was 17, the USSR was falling apart, and she could not study in university in her native Azerbaijan as she is from a small Christian minority (Udi), and tensions were hot between Muslims and Christians due to the first Nagorno-Karabakh war. Anzhelika comes to Horlivka, in eastern Ukraine, near Donetsk, to study English. There, she meets her husband, also from Azerbaijan, graduates, gets married, starts a family, builds a life.
I downloaded this map last night to better help me visualise the places in Anzhelika’s story. It now reads like a map of tears, if you have been following the news of 2022, and not only.
When the first war breaks out in 2014, Anzhelika and her family experience the violence in Horlivka firsthand, and in January 2015 pack their things, and move to Kramatorsk. They had relatives in Russia, but decided to go to Ukraine, to the side still under Ukrainian control. They had to start from scratch: find an empty apartment to rent, new jobs, new schools. The girls were then 7 and 11. Anzhelika recalls the long, icy drive on a snowy road that felt empty, and the joy they felt when they finally saw Ukrainian soldiers and a Ukrainian flag. Her husband had a cousin in Kramatorsk, he let them stay with him for a few days.
Anzhelika’s husband would regularly make the 80 kilometre journey back to Horlivka by car, to check on their house, to throw out the Christmas tree, to gather more of the family’s belongings. Anzhelika recalls the mood in Donestk region at the time, how the least educated members of society — former criminals, drug addicts, were promoted to new roles and responsibilities by the new “authorities”. She didn’t like the feeling of lawlessness, didn’t understand why so many of her neighbours had swallowed the cheap Russian propaganda so easily. She chalks it down to the region being filled with many workers, miners, perhaps they didn’t have enough education to weed out the truth from cheap lies.
Anzhelika taught English in Kramatorsk. They were registered in Ukraine as IDPs: internally displaced persons. Sometimes there were a few payments from international organisations, but not often. Anzhelika describes Ukrainian cities which themselves were overwhelmed by inflows of refugees after the war began in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
By last year, if the family wanted to go to Horlivka, they had to drive up through Luhansk region, via Russia, all the way to Rostov, and then to drive through Donestk region to reach their former home, a 800 kilometer journey instead of 80 kilometers, due to covid restrictions (DNR/LNR borders were closed on the front lines but not with Russia).
Anzhelika got a feeling this war was coming two weeks before it actually started. She has adult students who take English lessons with her, and many of them work for international organisations in Ukraine like OSCE, UN. One student told her “my bosses, they are all leaving Ukraine.” This was early February. Anzehlika tells me she told her student not to worry but understood for herself “there will be war”. She was overwhelmed with the feeling they would be thrust into starting over, again, for the second time in their lives. By now, Anzhelika’s daughters are 15 and 19. The eldest is a student in Kharkiv studying English and Spanish. The youngest is still in school.
On the morning of February 24, the family awoke to a loud noise. When the second explosion shook the flat, they realised it was not a dream — it was real. Anzhelika had a busy day scheduled and everything was cancelled in an instant. She read the news from Mariupol and feared that could happen in other cities too. She said to her husband “we have daughters, we have to go”. The air raid siren was near their apartment. It was so loud. It was a constant reminder the country was at war. Anzhelika asks me, how did so many decide to stay? To sit in basements with kids? How could they do that? Do you know how many volunteers died trying to rescue people who refused to leave?
One week after the war started, the family began discussing where to go. They have Udi relatives in Russia, but the children said no, we cannot go to Russia. Anzhelika recalls a school class reunion in Krasnodar, 30 years after high school graduation. She shows me a photo on her phone of them all in their black and white Soviet school uniforms. Her classmates only knew their history from Soviet textbooks. It was 2020, and she was shocked by how much they had consumed Russian propaganda. How did they live so comfortably in Krasnodar without speaking their truth?
In mid-March, Anzhelika’s husband drove her and the girls to Lviv in the family car. They only packed for a few weeks. She really thought they were only leaving for a short time. Some others had gone to Russia, via Luhansk. You could pay guys who knew how to get past the checkpoints. In Lviv, the family went to the stadium, where there was a sea of volunteers and activity. Millions of people. They were assigned a place to stay in a school in a village. The SBU checked her husband’s phone after they found one contact with a “Z” logo. It was a nephew in Russia. Just weeks before, Anzhelika had texted him, how can you support the killing, aren’t you ashamed? The boy had even lost friends who had been sent to die in Putin’s army, and still supported the war. Anzhelika is not angry her husband’s phone was checked. She says in wartime, they must be careful and check these things.
The family lived in a school in a village. They did not know anyone in western Ukraine. They had never been there before. Her older daughter said she had a university friend from Kharkiv who was in Austria. Perhaps they too should go there? In May, they went to Lviv to get an international passport for the older daughter. By now, the family had been living in a classroom of a school near Lviv for two months. In June, they received the new passport. They took a train from Lviv to Slovakia. From Bratislava, they came to Vienna. Anzhelika remembers being fed at the Caritas cafeteria on site at the Vienna train station, and their friend meeting them in Eisenstadt, and the local NGO employee showing them to their housing. The family share a home with three other Ukrainian families in Mattersburg. They are grateful: it is all simple, and clean. It is their first time in Europe. The free travel in the summer on trains is like a gift from above. Anzhelika wants to go everywhere and see everything. She is sometimes annoyed if her teenagers don’t share the same enthusiasm and wanderlust. She went with her neighbours often instead.
Anzhelika applied for the Kulturpass, amazed she now had free access to so many museums. Her husband stayed behind in Ukraine, he went back to Kramatorsk. He is alone there now. She tells him over video how to use the washing machine. They worry about how he is doing, alone. They talk about how maybe they can meet up somewhere, somehow, for New Year’s.
Anzhelika and her girls are surviving on the €6 each per day they receive from the Austrian government. The eldest is studying still at her Kharkiv university online, and the youngest is doing online school in Ukraine, although Anzhelika admits, it’s not the same as in person. She pulls out her phone to show me photos of her eldest in a ballgown at her high school graduation. A gown with a matching mask. Covid ruined a lot of that too.
The family attend German classes in Mattersburg, twice a week. The girls have found many friends online, and have their own new social circle. Recently, an Austrian “Secret Santa” visited the house and brought treats for all the families. The girls received gift cards from “New Yorker”, and Anzhelika proudly shows me a photo of her girls and their friends and their shopping bags. They look like happy, normal teenagers.
Anzhelika can supplement her income a bit by teaching online English, although most Ukrainians cannot afford to pay much. She helps one of her neighbours for €5 per hour. She feels useful, and they are grateful. Her English is a huge asset as she navigates their new life here. I sit there in amazement of her perfect vocabulary and grammar (totally fluent) despite never having lived abroad.
In August, she went back briefly, got more things out of the car they left in Lviv. She had to get permission to travel back, so as not to lose their housing in Austria. Maybe her husband can come here for New Year’s. He has a disability, he is blind in one eye. Maybe they would let him out for a visit. Maybe the family can meet in western Ukraine, but rentals are so expensive.
Anzhelika recalls years past and shows me videos from family holidays in Lyman. If the name sounds familiar, this is why. I see deep forest and summer greens and a lake on the images on her phone. Like something out of a dream. The before times. And then I look at the map again, and recall the horrific images I saw recently of Bakhmut. What is it like for families whose places of origin are now synonymous with so much human suffering? Where will her girls tell their children home is?
Anzhelika has a fascinating background. She understands Udi, speaks Azeri with her husband “it’s like our secret language”, and they speak Russian as a family. Her English is as perfect as I’ve ever heard from anyone who never lived in an English-speaking country, and she radiates positivity despite all the unknown questions about their future and what they have already been through. She asks me if I have met many families who lost their homes twice. Yes, I nod. I have. I tell her about my time at the train station. Many families who left Luhansk and Donetsk regions in 2014 then lived in rentals in Kyiv or Odesa, and when war came in 2022, they told me: that’s it, we’re going to Canada. Nothing to go home to anymore. Anzhelika says the head teacher of the school where she used to work recently emigrated to Canada with her four children.
Anzhelika talks about her family in Russia. She says, “can you believe it? They have Putin’s portrait on their wall! The man who twice ruined our lives. I used to like Russia. I used to like visiting Russia. Now I can only look at their flag and feel filled with hatred.” I nod in understanding. I tell her I often talk with Ukrainians whose relatives in Russia never believed them about the realities of war, and defended Russia’s position. My own dad sends me the occasional RT article, even now, even when I say please don’t, I don’t want to read it.
Family stuff is never easy.
I thank Anzhelika for her time on a Sunday, for making the journey as the train tickets are no longer free, and the family receives no extra financial help, so train journeys are now a luxury. In the evening she sends me this family photo, and tells me she had a wonderful day in Vienna, visited a museum.