How are you all coping? Part 1
Last night I asked "how are you all coping?" in preparation for an upcoming interview with local journalists. I was flooded with private messages. I share some, anonymised, with you here now.
My fellow volunteer Jenia (and Austria’s leading expert on such scary Austrian words as Zuverdienstgrenze and Grundversorgung) and I have been invited to speak with some Austrian journalists tomorrow to shed light on the current situation for Ukrainians who have sought temporary protection in Austria. In order to give accurate answers, I asked my group last night, how are you doing?
At first, no one answered in the group, and I thought hmmmm, that’s odd.
Then, my inbox was flooded with private messages, long essays about how life is right now for them, the challenges they face, the struggles, the difficult decisions. I realised quite quickly that these are painful, personal stories which one does not share easily in a group of 3000 strangers. Therefore I asked and received permission to share with you translations of their stories, anonymised to protect their identities.
There are so many stories that this will be the first of a few posts dedicated to this topic. Ukrainians, in their own words, on what life is like for them in Austria now. Of course no two families are exactly the same, but certain trends emerge — ongoing school challenges, worries about kids’ futures, the difficulty of not being able to rent affordable housing in Vienna even with an official job given the number of family members. The looming question in the background of all of this is what legal status, if any, Ukrainians will have in Austria post-March 2025. In fact, technically speaking, they haven’t even yet received new blue cards to replace those which will expire in a few months. This makes Austrian private landlord particularly nervous; they don’t read EU laws, they ask for documentation.
All names changed
Anastasia, in her own words:
“Good evening. I decided to write a few sentences about my family. It is me, my son aged 10, and my mom, aged 72. We probably don’t live badly if compared to this who are really struggling. But that is because we rent a studio apartment, one room, and the kitchen is also in this room. It costs €450 per month. Upper Austria. We have more or less enough for food and our expenses, because I work for an Austrian manufacturing company. I don’t know German yet, we would really like to go home. We are hoping to go home. My son’s father was killed in February defending Bakhmut.
What bothers me the most is my helplessness regarding my son’s education. He is still attending two schools. Ukrainian — every day online in the evenings. It is difficult. The teacher from his Austrian school said he will not be graded in German in the first semester, and this means he will not have the chance to apply to gymnasium. I am writing letters and trying to figure something out. But there is only a little hope…
If they will give my son a German grade, the best case scenario it will be a “3”. And with such a grade he won’t be accepted to gymnasium…it’s like a dead end.
He was happy at home. He went to a private school with two languages of instruction and 60% of his classes were taught in English.
The Austrian company I work for has a Ukrainian subsidiary which I worked for in Ukraine. In Irpin. The factory burned down. The Austrians knew me before the war, I used to come here on business trips and worked for them for many years. So my job here is like charity from their side. I continue to work on the Ukrainian business but from here. They are rebuilding the factor in Irpin and the company survived.
I forgot to add — they calculated that my mom must return €990. That is when they decided to calculate Ukrainian pensions as income. At first she was totally stressed, but I calmed her down. To be honest, it is so petty of them. Now she receives €156 each month in benefits from the state and she must pay back €30 of this each month towards her debt. So they calculate she should live on €126 per month.
We will survive, but it leaves a terrible taste in your mouth.
I don’t need their theoretical €850 for refugees, nor do I need their housing. We want to go home. We still need to make preparations for this, so that we could live and work in our own country. Our men go to the front and don’t return. Everyone is exhausted, we permanently feel as if we are to blame. Maybe yes, but we have already collectively paid such an enormous price.”
Maria, in her own words:
“Good evening, Tanja. Thank you that you are trying to speak publicly about us and our problems. The biggest problem now is the Zuverdienstgrenze limiting how much we can legally earn in Lower Austria so as not to lose benefits (€110 per month per adult plus €90 per dependent). I am here with my son who is 7 years old. I rent an apartment for €430 plus electricity €160. We have electric heating. It is a small village 100 kilometres from Vienna and 30 kilometres from St Pölten. I receive €405 per month benefits (for me and my son together) and €300 compensation for rent. Plus Familienbeihilfe €190. So that makes €895 in total. Which sounds like a lot. But I immediately hand over €590 for rent and electricity. Every month I have to pay for public transportation €75. That leaves €230 for food and everything else. From that money I pay the German tutor for my son €40 per month (online once per week sessions). I need the public transport pass because on Mondays we go to St Pölten to group German lessons for kids, they are free. On Thursdays we go to Vienna for group German lessons for kids, those are also free. I am studying online four times per week German classes. These are also free, but we had to pay for the textbooks ourselves. My son is doing well with German, as he is in the only Ukrainian in the school and he is participating in these extra classes. I really fear that without these extra German classes he would have to repeat first grade for the third time.
With work I have no luck. I worked for half a year illegally doing seasonal labor for a salary of €240 per month. If they had hired me officially, I would have lost all the payments we currently receive. The village here is tiny, population 2500. Neighbors see things, and my work would have been seen. (One of the large NGOs) visits the town because there are Ukrainians and Syrians living in social housing here. I cannot take a full-time job because of my son in order to receive a good salary and get off of benefits. And I cannot take on part time work legally, because they would take away all my benefits, and we cannot survive here on €250-300 per month. The government essentially drives us into illegal work with its rules. And you understand, I cannot say no to extra work, because if I say no, they will never offer again. It is really hard to survive on the €190 that are left. It is possible, but hard.
The free groceries from Red Cross really help us. We can receive them once every two weeks. But you can only reach them by car. They give them out in a town that is 30km from here. You would have to change buses twice to get there without a car and would miss the last bus back to our village. So I pay €7 to a family from Ukraine who also live here and have a car, and go with them to get the groceries. Everything they give us is expired, but most of it you can still eat. Those products save us. That economises the rest of our budget.
Sorry for the long text. I wanted to explain the details of the situation. I think that it is possible to deal with everything in Austria, and you an solve your problems. But in my personal situation, the most critical question is in the restrictions on earnings (Zuverdienstgrenze). There is no logic to it. The rules tie the hands of those who cannot work full-time and cannot survive on the social payments alone.
Thanks again. I hope maybe someone will hear us and you 🙏.”
Oksana, in her own words:
“Good evening, Tanja! My husband and I have work experience. Very sad.
We arrived in April 2022 with our family. They put us in a 3-room apartment where there were 3 families (we are a family of 5). So 10 people with one toilet, one bathroom, a boiler of 20L (it was enough for two people to shower) and one small fridge for three families (each one got one shelf). After one month of that living situation, we registered with AMS and everywhere. We sent our resumes all around. We began looking for an apartment. In the end we found work as dishwashers in a restaurant kitchen because we didn’t know the laws nor the language. To say we literally left our intestines there is putting it mildly. My husband and I both worked in Ukraine since age 18. Not a day without work. We like to work. Therefore of course we approached our work seriously. We both worked 40 hours per week. But! They constantly forced us to work extra hours, and we ourselves understood that you cannot leave the restaurant dirty at the end of the shift. The schedule was fluid but most often we had the evening shift. From 3pm to 11pm or 4pm to midnight. We would eat standing over the dishwasher. There wasn’t even time to go to the toilet to change a pad (sorry for the detail). I even then bought adult diapers so as not to pee myself. If we ever managed to leave work on time, it was like a celebration. Most often we didn’t leave until 2am. We had to write all our overtime on a simple piece of paper.
We worked like this for 9 months. During this time, many people were fired or quit from dishwashing. No one could handle the work. Always new people coming. After six months we received the right to work overtime, and were told to take this on weekends. If we had known that earlier, we would have left before at 11pm, but at that point after eight hours you cannot even think straight. In the end, the owner of the restaurant saw that we are coping well with our jobs, there were fewer guests, so he started to fire people. So we had to take on even more work. At first it was just help, but then he began to demand we clean the toilets and restaurant as well. This way he saved money not just on dishwashers but on cleaners. My husband didn’t care because he is a man who calmly takes on any work. But I had a problem with the toilets. I just couldn’t do it. And I didn’t want to work at 5am. I have a son who had just started school and I needed to get him off to school in the mornings. I refused and they held it against me. They began treating me differently. They would give me a lot of work in the kitchen (chopping and preparation of food). I didn’t mind, only not to have to clean the toilets. We kept working. We had rented an apartment as soon as we got jobs. We were happy not to have to share a toilet and a kitchen. I cannot tell you how unsanitary the conditions in the restaurant were. Everyone from the manager to the dishwashers came to work sick with covid, flu, and other illnesses. I have never been so sick as I was during those 9 months! We constantly had a fever, cough, diarrhea. You would just start to recover and get sick again. And it was considered the best restaurant in town! And many customers! But that wasn’t everything. You couldn’t call in sick because there was no one to work and you couldn’t make it fall on your colleagues because they would then have to work until 6am.
There was one girl on our team who was often sick. They fired her. So we saw that and took pills, everything just not to pass out at work. My husband and I were hired on the same day and fired on the same day. I took 2 weeks holiday during that period. He never took any. Not one day. They paid us the same, he only got €100 more and that was after we made a fuss about unused holiday.
In the end, they fired us. After New Year’s, they had less clients, they had too many dishwashers, so they decided to fire one. She was under 25 so she could easily get unemployment from AMS. We needed to work for a full year to qualify for unemployment. So they kept us, and saw we were good workers. But a month later they already had second thoughts. I began to ask. We have a kid! An elderly mom! An apartment to pay for! They told us that they also plan to fire us. We were in shock! It was like a murder. But two weeks later we talked to a lot of people, they supported us, gave us some ideas, and we accepted the situation. When it was time to fire us, they decided to keep us. At that moment we had weighed all the pros and cons and decided to learn German. We realised we need to know the language in order to have jobs that bring not just money but joy. We are finishing A2 now. We are looking for work and sending our resume everywhere. But not many offers, actually, none. We hope the future will be better. Sorry for the long text. That is our experience. If you hadn’t asked, I would have preferred not to remember the nightmare.
Good night, our dear angel-protector. I hope that our experience will help someone. When I hear the name of that restaurant to this day my eye starts twitching.”
Daria, in her own words
“Tanja, hi! I would like to tell you my story. When we first arrived in Austria, I wrote a letter to ask for a school place. My daughter was a student at our city’s top English-math school, she was a straight-A student, won many olympiads, and plays tennis. She is fluent in English, at the point had only just begun to learn German, but she learns languages easily. I asked to give her a place in an academically-strong school and attached all the awards she had won. They assigned her to an “integration” class for immigrants and said there are no other options. The class had kids aged 6 to 11 all together 😵💫 in math they did 20+20 (in Ukrainian school at that point online she was dividing four digits by three digits and all in English), in English she learned the word for “bum” for two lessons 🤦🏼♀️🤪. She asked for more challenging assignments — useless. It was a waste of half a day. If she did not have the online Ukrainian school after lunch, it would have been a total step backwards. But those are victories. We could have dealt with that and gone to school but I was totally in shock from the way they treated the kids. My daughter said the teacher yelled at the kids. She is not used to being yelled at. No one had ever yelled at her before. So, school was a shock for us. And it was all the time: the teacher yelled, could grab a drawing out of a child’s hands and rip it, did not let the kids out for breaks, etc. Conversations with the school director did not help. More than anything, we were shocked that an assistant to the teacher called my daughter a traitor to her motherland for speaking Russian to a Russian-speaking girl during the break, and said that the war started because of girls like her and her parents are sponsors of terrorism 🤦🏼♀️🤪🤯🤯🤯 !
I fled under bombs with three kids from Kharkiv, I lost part of my home, all of my things (the Russians carried them out of our home), and arrived to a peaceful country, and then that… I wrote everywhere. To the local council, to the education ministry, no one even answered me. I contacted our embassy. A diplomat said to me that many complain about problems in schools and the only thing she can recommend as a mother to a mother is to take my kid out of that school. So I did. Now she has no school. I cannot pay for another private school (I pay for Ukrainian and a private kindergarten for my youngest daughter here), and it is not so easy to get accepted to those private schools, and I am not prepared to go to an ordinary school where they can yell at my daughter and she won’t learn anything. This is one of the main reasons why we will return to Kharkiv very soon to our half-destroyed house, to the place were shells still fall. I hope we will leave before they decide to send me a fine for my daughter not attending school.”
And the last story, I save it for last because it is a brilliant analysis of how Austria works from within from someone who believed, before he came to the EU, in a fantasy of a corruption-free place with equal opportunity for all. Now, he says, he asks himself, does Ukraine need such an EU?
Andrii, in his own words:
“Hi Tanja. I would like to write my impressions. I have a Master’s degree in economics. I ran a bank branch office in Ukraine. As an economist, I would call Austria a country of ‘managed monopolies’. I don’t see the state’s influence on those monopolies. I see a constant monopoly collusion in retail and energy, banking, and am shocked by corruption and protectionism at all levels. For example, they gave school children €200 in September. Thank you. But you can only spend them in one chain of stores. That is corruption! Officially they say the government gives refugees €75 towards clothing once every six months. But they give those out as gift cards which you can only use in C&A stores. So, from the budget the state transfers €150 per refugee per year, but the money goes to C&A! Pure protectionism. I am surprised that no one in Austria is bothered by this. When my daughter said to her teacher, that she is surprised she must buy school supplies only in Libro, the teacher said you should be happy they give anything at all!
I am also surprised by the huge amount of unnecessary bureaucracy. Instead of paying out help directly to the bank accounts of refugees, as they do in Lower Austria, in Vienna they do everything via a middleman — Caritas. Caritas is a huge amount of people renting a big space in one of the most expensive spaces in Austria Center. It is clear that this middleman is also funded by the state. Which, to justify its “usefulness”, makes life for refugees more complicated. All refugees must go to Caritas once per month, tick a box, bring documents from the insurance fund, show they are not working anywhere, sit in line for several hours to receive the right to these payments. Imagine, for example, 100,000 refugees each month go to the office of the insurance company just to get a paper for Caritas! It is a huge stress on ÖGK employees just in Vienna alone! A stress on public transport, etc. I would be interested to know what amount of financing is given to refugees from the state budget and how much actually reaches them directly. I suspect the majority of the funds end up with these middlemen on the way to reaching refugees.
I am also surprised by the lack of desire of the government to help refugees get off of social benefits. For example, a refugee wants to open his own business. After registering a private company, he and his entire family lose benefits and medical insurance. A person has not yet earned a single Euro, and his family has everything taken away and also medical insurance because of the desire to open a business! How can you open a business when your family has nothing to eat?
ÖIF is a story in and of itself. It is financed by the state and is interested in having a large number of students. Of 25 people taking an exam, in order to pass to the next level, usually only 5 pass. Usually they then go again and try to pass again (usually unsuccessfully because by this point 2-4 months have passed since the course ended). So the person signs up to take a class again at the same level. My son passed A2 at ÖSD; my wife passed A2 at ÖIF. ÖIF was harder. My son asked the examiner, how many people did not pass the exam, they said usually more than half. This means that ÖIF is harder by design. To keep more people in courses. In Germany, they loosened the rules, so that people could get more easily to B2 and find work. In Austria they have no desire to do this. A German course lasts 4 months, but the intervals between courses are huge (an exam may be only one or two months after a course finishes, and my wife only found out her test result one month after she took it), in the end it takes at least a year to pass two levels of German.
I would also like to write about corruption in education. There is a structure called VWU. Many students and grad students from Ukraine want to study in Austrian universities. What did they come up with. A grad student takes a German exam. At VWU. He receives a letter than he passed A2, but he need to take an extra German class which costs €1540 per semester! I spoke with one mom who told me: her daughter is taking B2 German with ÖIF, and received a letter that she only passed A2 and must take their course for a semester, and until she passes B1 with them, she is only allowed to take German classes with them. The daughter said the test was easy and she answered everything correctly. The mom goes to VWU and asks to see her daughter’s test. They refuse. She writes on social media, and asks for help. Other parents and students write back that they had exactly the same experience. Many people fell victim to this. They know the language well, and yet the test was graded badly. No one was allowed to see their tests. Most interesting — this year Vienna is offering via VWU not just one German course, but three! And a student must take only these courses, one must sign this when signing up for VWU. I think they must have a huge influx now of students, and a limited number of spaces at the universities, so they decided to make money on these extra German courses via these poor test results. That’s the scheme.
Austria is a wonderful country, many wonderful people live here. My family got to know many of them this year. Those people are the country’s biggest wealth.”
I know that was a lot of words. I will keep more for a part 2 and beyond. I also wanted to recommend some articles but will keep that for another day. For now, I want to share these stories, as varied as they are, they paint a better picture than abstract phrases like “the Zuverdiesntgrenze is too low”.