Inna's story
Plus what to read/listen, and a Cards for Ukraine update.
This week I was consumed by my own stuff. I find writing and being in my head and helping other people solve their problems much, much easier than solving my own. I am one of those dreamers who an analyse a complex problem but is absolutely rubbish at normal life stuff. At the moment, normal life stuff is kicking my butt. But there are little victories along the way, such as one which occurred this past Thursday, on “Tatiana day” no less, for which I am very grateful.
Now it is finally Sunday morning, and I have a moment to update you all. We have continued to send out cards this week — thank you so much. Many of the requests are from the elderly. One woman wrote me to ask what she should do. She is from Kharkiv, has been living with a kind Austrian lady who took her in nearly two years (!) ago, but she feels terrible that she is still living with this woman, and asks where can she go to ask for social housing? I give her an email address and another contact but explain there is no central office waiting to handle such requests. It is most definitely a situation out there right now much like survival of the fittest, and the federal states are still playing hot potato in terms of not wanting to provide more housing out of fear that it will draw more people to come. I received another message about a mother with cancer who is still in Ukraine and wants to come with her son, but will they be given housing? To that there is also no automatic answer. I feel some days that nine out of ten answers I provide are “sorry I do not know”.
I read an article this week hinting the EU may simply extend its temporary protection for another year beyond March 2025. The problem with this is that in countries like Austria, temporary protection is not equal to the same rights and benefits of permanent residents. Individual EU countries have implemented this directive as they see fit and the response is not universal. The political climate at the moment in Austria could be described as politicians everywhere right of center scrambling over themselves to each appear more anti-immigrant, more pro-domestic agenda, expel all the undesirable foreigners, etc. I exaggerate but not really. You cannot even have a productive, educated conversation about different groups of foreigners brining different skill sets, levels of education, etc. with them, because then the far left will jump on you for being discriminatory. Again, it feels like rational voices are muted in these times.
There is a good podcast in German which came out this week addressing some of the many reasons why so few Ukrainians are employed legally in Austria. I stress the word legally because most Ukrainians are not afraid of work, but when a system disincentivizes legal employment, as the Grundversorgung rules currently do, then people respond to incentives and make decisions accordingly. I still think it is really, really, really, really hard for locals, native German speakers who lived their whole lives in Austria, to understand just how challenging it can be to find a job (and housing) here for recent immigrants. There is still so much subtle prejudice. It is not as simple as to open up a list of vacancies online, send off your resume, and get called back. It doesn’t work like that in practice when your name is not Austrian. I have heard multiple Ukrainians tell me they sent their CV to 100 jobs only to get a half dozen replies and three interviews. And of course, as the podcast does address, many Ukrainians in Austria do have university diplomas and are choosing to focus now more on intensive German courses and then to search for a (hopefully) better paid position once they receive German language certification on a higher level.
I was contacted this week by a European journalist working on a story for the two-year mark since the start of the war, and the journalist asked me to provide contacts of Ukrainian families who would like to share their stories. I was really pleasantly surprised by the response, and the variety of replies. I hope the journalist will do the groundwork and the story will come out. The replies ranged from a mom living with her three year old in a dorm, to a cancer patient who has already lost many friends in the war and wants to speak anonymously about what he says is really happening inside the army, to families living in the countryside of Austria who have successfully started new projects and jobs here. There is of course a language barrier, as often the journalists covering these topics do not speak Ukrainian nor Russian, and unfortunately many of those who want to share their stories do not feel confident in their English anymore. So I always hope for the best and expect like always in these situations.
One mom wrote me last night with her long, personal story. I offered to share it here. School is still very much an ongoing topic. I overheard in a salon this week a mom talking about having left Donetsk for Kyiv in 2014, and now being in Austria with her daughter having left Kyiv, talking about how hard it is to keep having to start over, how hard school is for her daughter all in a new language, how the kids receive German lessons in the mornings and only in the afternoons do they get to join the local kids for other subjects, like physics. This mom and her beautician pragmatically seemed to accept that there is a very high chance that much of this generation of Ukrainian teenagers will have an interrupted, fragmented education, at best. I then hear from other moms who are fighting tooth and nail to try and prevent this from happening. In many cases, they are fighting against a system they really have no chance to change. And yet, they still try.
Inna writes:
Good evening, Tanja. I read that there will be interviews with a journalist in early February. I wrote my story. I want you to read it please and tell me what you think. I have a week off next week and could give an interview. But I do not speak English, but I could take one of my sons to help translate. Please read and tell me what you think.
Tomorrow is my younger son Dima’s birthday, he is turning 14, and also tomorrow is my dad’s birthday. I have not seen my parents for nearly two years. At the very start of the war I left Ukraine with my two sons for Austria and we have been here for nearly two years. Two years isn’t that much of a lifetime, but already so much has happened. This is my story.
My sons and I decided together to leave Ukraine. We have never regretted that decision for one minute. We were driven by a desire to protect the kids from death. Actually I was the one with doubts. My sons, then 12 and 14, saw the journey as an adventure, they did not then understand all the horrors of war, as we left at the beginning.
I truly believe that every person I met here in Austria along my way was sent to my path by God.
At first, like blind kittens, they took us literally “by the hand” (often it was exactly like this), a young family who welcomed us into their comfortable home that was filled with love.
A Ukrainian woman who has lived in Austria for many years became like our guardian angel.
Friends from Ukraine, who left before we did, were our support network, they were a reliable shoulder to lean on.
The search for housing, the search for schools for the kids — we did it all, we survived, we stood up, it didn’t break us.
December 2023. We are all waiting for a New Year’s miracle, our hopes and beliefs that something wonderful will happen in the new year and life will magically get better. In December at work (I work in a restaurant), there was a special meeting and they told us out of nowhere that the restaurant will be closing its doors in March 2024. The first thing I felt was fear. To be without work, to be without money, those words are synonymous to me. My head thinks back to the entire period of my first job in Austria. It was physically hard (I fainted twice in Austria, and that never happened to me before). But having a job (and a huge separate thanks to my manager who hired me basically with no German language skills) gave me the confidence in tomorrow, the ability to pay for our apartment rent.
And now a second shock for me (a positive one!) the owners of the restaurant will assign the workers to their other businesses, and offer us jobs. So that was how I got my second job.
What is not fixable at the moment is the children’s education. This I would compare to a wall which is impossible to break down.
Next week, my youngest son will bring home his grades for 4th grade middle school (Tanja — this is like 8th grade in America). My son has good grades. But all the gymnasiums which we applied to for grades 9-12 turned him away. So if it is possible to find elementary and middle schools for Ukrainian kids, anything beyond that, is really a huge challenge. And even my son’s class teacher is helping us to look for a school, she is sending me a lot of information. But so far, no luck.
My older son has similar problems. I decided for myself that everything is in our hands, that we will try to do that which they tell us is impossible. My oldest son was a student in the first grade of an HTL (Tanja — like a 5-year technical high school). But his German is not good enough, so it is possible that he won’t be able to stay there. What are we doing? My son studies German with a tutor, he went to ÖIF German courses B1.1, I paid for what with my own money (so that he could learn faster). Instead of getting closer to your goal of being able to pursue your education in German, you go through the seven circles of hell (you ask ÖIF for a course, for the dates, the waiting list period, then you get rejected, and you cannot make up the lost time). I believe that question should really be addressed on the state level (knowledge of German in Austria for youth is the key to receiving an education, and for their parents, to be able to work).
Therefore, looking back on what we have achieved after nearly two years of living here, I would like to say the following: everything that has to do with work, social programs for workers, work conditions, regulations to the smallest detail about how many hours you an work, take holiday, etc. I would like Ukraine to learn from Austria’s example.
Everything to do with the kids’ education, after middle school, there is a “deaf bureaucratic wall”, where there is no place for our Ukrainian teenagers.
Leaning German can be compared to walking on hot coals. You go through such barriers and difficulties in the learning process. When you need to learn really fast (and the kids learn fast, but they need the courses one after the other without breaks).
I send my dad a gift to Ukraine for his birthday. But he needs only one gift — he would like to see and hug his only two grandsons, and to see and hug his only daughter. The most important things in life are heathy relatives who are still alive, and peace.
Of course, nothing Inna says is surprising, and yet it does address head on some very basic questions. Austria’s education system was never one to reform itself, and it certainly wasn’t going to reinvent itself (the horror) on behalf of 15 year old Ukrainian kids who would like to continue their education and have a chance to apply to university. From Austria’s perspective, the country needs workers. I can imagine a world in which they create some new apprenticeships and the like, but just like nearly everything here, it will be too little, too late. The sad truth is this entire generation of Ukrainians kids is going to have some major gaps in their education simply as a result of having to flee their homes, learn new European languages, and start over in a new country. Even those who stayed, in many cities, schools are still online-only and school days are interrupted by air raid sirens. This is the new normal, sadly.
I have no tips or solutions. I share Inna’s story because on paper she is doing everything right — working hard, paying her bills, taking care of her kids the best she can as a single mom. And she has dreams for her sons she is not ready to give up on, even though the surrounding environment is sending her exactly that message. Sometimes all it takes is a miracle. And those still do happen, especially to those who really believe and try really hard to bark up all the trees.
If you have not read it already, I really recommend this FT magazine piece by Christopher Miller about the only border crossing still open between Russia and Ukraine, in Krasnopillya, between Sumy and Belgorod, used by those Ukrainians who have been living under Russian occupation and now seek to leave for Ukraine. The stories are vivid in detail and shocking in content. We don’t talk enough about what is happening inside these areas right now, to the ordinary people who didn’t leave.
I also came across this Reuters story about corruption within defence purchasing. I often wonder, not whether corruption exists (that I have no doubt), but how much of these new “discoveries” are just to appease the EU. How do you know what is real and what isn’t. It becomes a mirage. And is it really relevant right now when a country is quite literally fighting for survival? I don’t know. But these seem like made-up headlines. They don’t feel like real news when civilians are still being bombed and killed in their homes.
Meanwhile:
I replied this morning to a Ukrainian MP rather naively (imho) tweeting about the U.S. supposedly letting everyone down as this bastion of functional democracy which now cannot provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs. The U.S. is slowly turning inwards, and has been for sometime. It is consumed by its own upcoming election, by the long-term biggest threat it faces (China), and Congress has not been a functional law-passing institution for the greater good for sometime. I understand the desperation, but you also have to look at a situation without the rose-tinted glasses. Europe would feel real pain from a fall of Ukraine much more than the U.S. would. The average American would feel next to zero impact. Europe, on the other hand, faced with the rise of the far right here and many elections this year, Europe should be very nervous about a Russia set on confrontation in its neighbourhood at large.
I also keep thinking about what you need more than weapons. You need men to fight and operate them. I cannot judge morale inside Ukraine, but I can say for those Ukrainians outside of Ukraine, the mood is gloomy. People understand why families try to get their men out. People understand why mothers want to send their teenage sons abroad. Everyone seems to have finally accepted the reality of a long war, and all the long-term implications that has for a population. What I see now is people looking out for themselves, making decisions based on individual self-interest. Which itself is a crisis response. It does not feel anymore like the early days of the war when there was a feeling of rich or poor, urban or rural, east or west, we are in this together. There is resentment about those who have used the war as an opportunity to enrich themselves, about those who saved their own kids but want to mobilise other young men.
This, is also, a fair assessment:
There is still camaraderie in the sense that in my Telegram group Ukrainians are asking and providing answers to all sorts of day-to-day life questions. But 99% of each family’s time is consumed by how they can best survive this very difficult period in their country’s history in a new country. It is like operating under high cortisol levels for months on end. I think it changes you over time. You lose empathy, you start to act more defensively, you become less trustful of others. I am pretty sure if they were to google the symptoms of chronic stress many will be eerily familiar.
Ukrainians are still writing me, especially the elderly, and asking for help. And as long as we at Cards for Ukraine still have from our private donors a budget, we will continue to send out that help. I feel like it has a significant symbolic meaning beyond the €50 in self-selected groceries. The words of gratitude speak for themselves.
Thank you for your continued support. It is still making a different to those who are just hanging on, through no fault of their own.
Life can be cruel, and unfair, and what hand you are dealt is often simply a birth lottery. When we forget that, we lose our humanity.