Lana & Nika
The first in a series of twelve days of Christmas. Personal stories by Ukrainians now in Austria. In their own words.
Lana agrees to meet me in Cafe Museum for coffee after she has dropped three and a half year old Nika off at her new kindergarten in Vienna’s 10th district, an ethnically diverse neighbourhood where Lana says she now feels very much at home. We take seats across from each other on plush red velvet sofa chairs, and she begins to tell me her story. I first chatted online with Lana at the end of summer, when she sent me a cryptic message. It read: this address (suburban Vienna), please warn other Ukrainians not to accept offers to live there. Now, three months later, Lana agreed to share her family’s story of their journey to Austria.
Lana is from Kharkiv. She is 35, married (unhappily — I won’t get into the details here but she says she would like to unwind the legal ties but makes her best effort so that her daughter can have a good relationship with her father), and before the war she worked two jobs. A daytime role as a logistics dispatcher in which she was responsible for giving instructions to 100 men. “I know men,” she says, “I know how to work with them, how to talk to them, I know how to manage them.” At night, she cleaned offices. When the war started, Lana and her daughter Nika, then not even three, spent a week in a bomb shelter. Lana shows me videos on her mobile phone: dark, dusty, damp, cold, exposed brick, not the kind of place you can imagine spending an hour in, never mind a week. Nika ran a high fever, they decided to leave Kharkiv.
The family first got a ride through work connections to Dnipro, and from there they headed to western Ukraine, where they found housing in a village with no amenities. A country house, an outhouse, no indoor plumbing, taking baths using buckets. They spent four months in western Ukraine. Lana was desperate to leave for Europe, she had friends who were already in Germany and Poland, but warned her those countries were “full”. Lana’s husband obviously couldn’t leave, and didn’t want his wife and daughter to go. By the end of the summer, he acquiesced, and Lana found bus tickets from Ternopoil oblast directly to Vienna. Through a Telegram group, she found a posting from a Ukrainian man in Austria, saying there was a room available in a house on the outskirts of Vienna with an elderly Austrian man in his 80s. Lana agreed, and left Ukraine with her daughter, their first time in the EU.
I ask Lana why the old man didn’t list the room in his home through one of the charities who normally made such placements. She explained that because he is a man living alone, the NGOs would not place women and children in such situations. Lana describes a big house on the outskirts of Vienna and they were given a room on the upper floor. The old, heavyset man lived alone and did not speak with his grown children. At first, everything was fine, Lana regularly took Nika out to enjoy the late summer long days and warm weather, they explored local parks and the old man even bought a little bicycle for Nika.
But one day when Lana was cooking in the kitchen, the old man came up to her, pushed up against her from behind, and tried to kiss her. She managed to express her disagreement using the few German words she knew, “nein” “nicht”. He said, “why are you afraid of me?”. A few days later, he tried again, trying to kiss her, trying to put his hands up her t-shirt. After the first time, Lana didn’t tell anyone. The young Ukrainian man who had placed her in the house was away on vacation. But when she saw the old man making furniture arrangements — he was getting rid of his single hospital bed and had ordered a new queen sized bed to be delivered to his bedroom — she realized he was more than just a lonely old man happy to host refugees in need of shelter. He clearly thought he had found himself a new wife.
After Lana rejected the man’s advances, he changed his tone towards them. The atmosphere in the house was tense. When the young Ukrainian man came back from holiday, he stopped by for a visit, and Lana stepped outside for a smoke with him to tell him what had been happening. The old man had been jealous, getting annoyed with Lana when they came home “late” from a playground or from meeting a friend. The Ukrainian man was shocked. Lana told him to ask the old man for two more weeks, so that she could search for alternative housing.
She went to the Train of Hope at Stadion, and told them her story. It happened the police were on site that day. They wanted her to report the man’s full name and address. She didn't want to do that. She had understood by then he was a lonely old man who didn’t want a Ukrainian family to host but rather a Ukrainian wife. He had even said things like I can leave you the house if you do as I ask…
After Lana shared her story at Train of Hope, two hours later they found a room for her at a Vienna hotel used to temporarily host refugees. She went back to the house, tidied up her room, packed her things, and left with Nika. The old man was really upset, but determined “our personalities didn’t get along”. A female neighbour emerged who had always been friendly to Lana and Nika, and said the old man never liked foreigners. She had her concerns from the outside about the whole living arrangement.
Lana and Nika lived for ten days in the hotel, at which point she was given an appointment at ACV. In a stroke of pure luck (because this rarely happens so quickly), she was told a room had just become available in a former pensioners’ home in Vienna’s 10th district. Twelve Ukrainian families were already living there. Lana and her daughter moved to the 10th district, and have been there, happily, ever since.
Lana found a kindergarten for Nika, it is from 8am to 3pm, and she has to pay €50 per month (this is a 50% discount and lunch is subsidized by the state). Nika is the only Ukrainian kid in the group, but she goes happily in each morning. Lana would love to work. She has researched that even cleaning jobs can pay €1400 per month, but unfortunately due to the rules of the state support system in Austria for refugees, Lana cannot work legally without losing immediately their housing. The ceiling on monthly earnings is €110 per adult and €80 per dependent child. Where would I get a job that only pays €190 per month, she asks?
Lana would like to stay in Austria. She speaks English, and Turkish, as she worked before her marriage for a few years as a hotel receptionist in Turkey. She loves living in the 10th district, and tells me story of how one time she called a Bolt (like Uber) to take her daughter to the zoo, because it was so far from where they were living at the time, and when the driver learned she could speak Turkish, he promised to return for them the evening and drive them home, for free. He kept his promise, even stopping to buy them McDonalds on the way home. He was a Turkish father of six, and wanted to help this Turkish-speaking Ukrainian woman and her young child during their first weeks in a new country. He warned Lana, “be careful, there are many crazy people here.” When he wouldn’t accept money for the taxi ride, he said to her, “buy your kid something she wants instead.”
I ask Lana about Nika, how the war has affected her, what is it like to explain war to a toddler? “Nika understands there is war in our country,” she says, ”she knows there are our guys and bad guys, and our guys are defending our motherland.” When the war first broke out, and missiles were flying in their Kharkiv neighbourhood, Lana ran to the bathroom with Nika and told her, “you have to listen to mom now.” Nika thought it was fireworks. She asked her mom, “why are you afraid of fireworks?”. Lana was traumatized as her husband had run out to a pharmacy and a missile landed right there as he was gone. She waited nervously for him to return home. He did.
It was only when they lived in the hotel in Vienna that they had access to a TV. There, Lana was able to watch a Ukrainian news channel, and Nika looked at the screen and asked, “is that our city?”. Nika remembers the days in the cellar. She was not yet even three. She remembers it all. The old lady and the dog. She sometimes asks to go to Gorky Park in Kharkiv, to see the dinosaurs. Lana has to explain the “mean uncles” bombed the city and they cannot go back. She tells Veronika the mean uncles did this because they are jealous. Jealous of how good life was in Ukraine. Nika misses her dad. She has video calls with him. She told Lana one day, “I am not afraid of anything. Only war.” A three year old said that. When Nika sometimes heard the air raid sirens in western Ukraine, she panicked.
Lana signed up to attend German class from January, in the mornings when Nika is in kindergarten. She is struggling to make their budget stretch. They receive a little over €400 per month for the two of them, from which she has to pay for kindergarten (€50) and her public transport ticket (€33) and buy food and everything else. She shops at social supermarkets. There is one by the Canadian embassy. You can pay €8 and get a bag of mostly expired products. Her husband does not send them any money. Some of the other grocery charity services are no longer taking on any new “clients”.
I ask about Lana’s parents. They are still in Kharkiv. Yesterday they had no electricity from 8:30am to 9pm. Sometimes it goes as long as 48 hours without. Everyone with any money at all is looking for generators. Her brother has a prestigious job. Even he sent his family to western Ukraine. There is no life for kids when you constantly don’t know if a missile will strike or not, and cannot attend normal school, and cannot plan anything as electricity is uncertain, Lana explains how her brother relayed his decision process to her.
When Lana fled, she left her car behind. It had no winter tires. She knew she wouldn’t get far. They hitched a ride first to Dnipro and then to western Ukraine. She called everyone she knew to ask for help. She says, “there are good and bad people everywhere, but people from Kharkiv, Kherson, Mariupol — we all hate Russia now. Kharkiv is 40 kilometres from Belgorod. The Russians all used to come shop in our market. It was the largest in Europe before 2014. It worked 24/7, they even lit it up with floodlights at night. The Russians would come and buy all the things they couldn’t find at home.”
Lana has no plans to return to Ukraine anytime soon. There is no work, no school. The bus trip from Ternopil oblast to Vienna took 26 hours.
She told Nika, “Your home is where Mama or Papa is next to you. That is your home.”
Lana likes it here. She is grateful to Austria. She looks forward to learning German and being able to work and building a life in Vienna. She does not complain about the incidents at the old man’s house. She seems to have put them entirely behind her and moved on. She proudly shares with me some photos a Ukrainian photographer took of her and her daughter in Schönbrunn. “I want the grandparents to see how Nika is growing”, Lana explains. “I want her to remember the happy times we have had here, too”.