Lena
The second in a new series of first person interviews with Ukrainians now living in Austria. For privacy reasons, names are often changed, as is this case in this interview, per Lena's request.
From the seaside city of Odesa with such a rich history via Moldova to the Polish capital and then to a small village in the Tirolean alps via Vienna: Lena’s journey is one which takes some time to explain, and as it unfolds you begin to truly understand what Lena means when she says she has “learned to believe in people” and a series of “miracles” made this seemingly unlikely transition possible.
I spoke with Lena by phone for an hour and a half yesterday. She was on the terrace of her family’s apartment in a Tirolean mountain village, in the greater Landeck region. At 11am and 12pm, I could hear the church bells ringing loudly as we chatted. Lena reached out to me and wanted to share her story, which I now share with you, paraphrasing how she recalled it to me yesterday by phone.
Lena is 40 years old. She is a lawyer by training, and in Odesa worked as an assistant to a notary public. She is married and has a 16 year old daughter. Her husband is 47 and was the co-owner of a small business in Odesa related to the local ports. She did not plan to come to Austria. When the war started, she was, like many others, in a panic. They also thought it would be quickly over. She and her daughter, upon her husband’s urging, left for Moldova, together with Lena’s mother, packing only a few backpacks and one small bag between the two of them. They thought they would be back in a few days.
Friends then called them from Poland, and offered a one-room tiny apartment in Warsaw. Lena, her mother, and her daughter arrived in Warsaw on March 9, 2022. Lena immediately registered the family with the Polish authorities, and began searching for work, any kind of work. She knew she could not afford to rent housing for her family in Poland if she did not find a job. For two months, she searched for a job, and was not able to find anything. It was very difficult, three generations, with different sleep schedules and interests, trying to share a single room. But Lena had no luck finding a job, at least not one which would pay enough to cover the rental of a two room apartment in Warsaw. Lena had no leads from the Polish job center, and she never applied for social payments from the Polish government. She did apply to the UN, and they received 900 Zloty per person two weeks after their arrived (about €200). This money was only paid out during the first three months, but it fed the family, and they were able to hold onto the money they left Ukraine with (€800 of personal savings).
I ask Lena if her husband sent them money from Ukraine to Poland and she said no, explaining she wanted him to hold on to whatever he had been able to earn during the war, as she did not know when she would see him next. The start of the war had taken them all by surprise. She was pushed to leave when her daughter started to experience panic attacks when the sirens went off. Lena’s husband, looking at their daughter, urged Lena to leave Ukraine, “then I won’t have to worry so much about you both”, explaining Odesa is a port city and as such could come under attack for some time. No one knew at the time what to expect. There were even rumours the dreaded Kadyrovtsi might show up.
Lena reminds me of something we often forget: when the war broke out, much of western Ukraine was already living and working in Poland. They were economic migrants. Of course, when the war broke out, their families arrived first to Poland, and many of their relatives took the first available jobs. By June 2002, Lena called her husband, frustrated that she could not find viable employment, and said she wanted to come home. Everyone wanted to go home: teenage daughter and grandma, too. Then, something between luck and fate intervened, or perhaps a combination of the two.
Lena has a 23 year old niece, her sister’s daughter, who was educated in Poland in restaurant and hotel operations, and was living in Turkey. With experience as a hotel waitress and fluent English, she was sending her resume to resorts across Europe: Germany, Austria, Cyprus. She wrote that she has a big family from Ukraine and many of her family members would also be happy to work for a hotel. Lena’s niece received a positive reply from a hotel in the Landeck region of Tirol, Austria. She went alone, and was provided a room in hotel employee housing, with a shared kitchen, and was hired as a waitress assistant in the hotel restaurant. Good English and hospitality work experience was enough to get the job. As soon as her niece began working, she also began inquiring if anyone would be able to offer jobs to her aunt. Lena jokes it was not just she who wanted to work in a hotel, but her 16 year old daughter and the grandmother, too. Lena says over and over: “I told my daughter, it is my job to work and your job to study, to finish your education.”
While in Poland, Lena’s daughter continued her Ukrainian education online, but she refused to attend a local Polish school. Unlike Austria, Poland did not force Ukrainian kids to attend local schools; online school was considered an acceptable alternative. By early summer 2022, Lena was sending emails everywhere. She opened up Google Maps, searched for hotels in Tirol and the west of Austria, and began sending a simple CV explaining they are a Ukrainian family looking for work in a hotel and a place to live. Her niece, meanwhile, in Tirol, was using her time off of work to chat with the owners of neighbouring hotels, inquiring if there might be work and housing for Lena and her family, explaining they are in Poland but willing to come to Austria as soon as something might be available.
Today, there are seven of them living in this little mountain village. Lena, her daughter, her husband (who joined in the fall and was able to leave Ukraine thanks to an exception from military service due to a medical condition), Lena’s niece, the niece’s husband (he was abroad when the war began), the niece’s husband’s sister, and her teenage daughter. Seven not including Yury the German shepherd!
I have to interrupt Lena. I explain I still do not understand how they all managed to get to Tirol from Poland and everywhere else.
“It was a miracle, we were really, really really lucky with the people we met.”
One of the hotel owners the niece spoke with had agreed to provide Lena’s whole family, then in Poland, three generations of women, with a place to live. On that promise, Lena, her daughter and her mother took a bus to Vienna from Warsaw and then a train to Innsbruck. Before leaving Poland, they had to run around and gather all the documents showing they had officially left Poland, so that they may apply for blue cards in Austria. Lena recalls she had pages and pages of documentation.
The family made it by bus from Warsaw to Vienna, and then Lena tells me how they asked for train tickets to Innsbruck, and I know exactly which ticket desk she is describing because it was June 2022 when we volunteers were told we were no longer needed Vienna’s central train station. Without volunteers on site, no one told Lena she needed a seat reservation, no one told her a single platform in Vienna can hold two different trains, that you need to look if it is 7A-B or 7CDE. In short — the women nearly missed their train trying to find the one headed for Innsbruck when the platform read Munich. I too remembered this route — the train splits in half in Salzburg. The things we as volunteers learned last year…
Upon arrival in Innsbruck with all of their bags (by this point they had bought summer clothes, bedding, etc), they went to register at the Hotel Europa (now closed by Tirol authorities). Lena showed the letter written by the hotel owner that they were travelling to the village, and declined any form of social payments from the Austrian state. She explained they had come to work. Her niece had met them at the train station in Innsbruck. They then took another train to Landeck where the owner of the hotel met them and helped drive the women and their bags to their new home.
When Lena walked in she could not believe it. A two-room apartment with a terrace. The fridge had been filled with food: butter, jam, fruit, bread. The beautiful nature. Lena was nearly crying tears of joy. She could not believe their luck. “I just wanted a roof over my head and the opportunity to work, to buy my own groceries, provide for my daughter.”
The hotel owner explained they had offered the apartment for a Ukrainian refugee family, but had no takers yet. Perhaps the remote location had made others hesitant to accept the offer. Or perhaps NGOs put it on a list and forgot about it. Lena says the apartment seemed enormous after their tiny one room in Warsaw, and the Austrian family grandmother was so happy, as she had really wanted to help a refugee family with the apartment, and now she could see how pleased Lena and her family were to be offered the housing.
Lena and her family received their blue cards about two weeks later. She then immediately asked the hotel owner for a job. He was hesitant, at first, explaining they could simply stay in the apartment for as long as they needed and would not have to worry about food, etc. But Lena insisted, “I want to work”. So she was offered a job as a housekeeper, and she now works full time, and has received praise and positive reviews from clients. Lena is about to start her third season, as she calls it, as a housekeeper in the local hotels.
Lena’s 16 year old daughter was enrolled, together with her cousin, in a local gymnasium, again with the help of their local hosts. The girls wake up on school mornings at 5am, the bus leaves the village at 6:20am, and it is an hour’s ride to the school in the bigger city (the local village only has a kindergarten and a primary school). The teens are the only Ukrainians in the whole school, were extremely lucky to be accepted to gymnasium, and were simply enrolled one grade below their age group. They were graded on most but not all subjects this year, and the teaching staff decided the girls may advance to the 6th grade (10th), but this year they will be graded in Math, German and Biology. It was not easy. For the first six months, Lena explains, her daughter protested. It was a huge adjustment: a new language, a new school, younger classmates. But now she is thriving, and this summer even told her mother she misses school, and looks forward to the academic year starting again. Lena’s daughter has discovered the local stables, and is helping out with the horses, in exchange for free riding lessons. She just had her third this week. The teens are also continuing with online Ukrainian school. Lena and her husband would like their daughter to eventually study in Europe. That was always the plan, she says, even when they were in Odesa.
Lena’s husband joined them in Austria, by car, with the family dog Yury, by early fall 2022. He completed the paperwork necessary to leave Ukraine, given his medical condition, which is essentially an exception from military service. With the help of their local hosts, he found a job at a factory in the local area, about a twenty minute drive down the mountain. He too has received positive feedback from his employers, despite having no prior factory experience. Lena explains why she wanted her husband to join her so badly. She herself lost her father at the age of 11. He was a sailor and was declared a missing person (she suspects he fell overboard). Her mother then raised Lena and her sister alone, receiving no compensation for her husband’s death at sea. Lena would like her own daughter to have both parents around.
The family left behind their family house in Odesa. They recently gave it to a family from Kherson who had lost their home after the dam burst at Kakhovka. Lena and her husband told the family they can live in their home in Odesa for as long as they need to, for free, as long as they pay their own utility bills. The family escaped with two German Sheppards of their own, one of whom sadly died in Odesa. Lena says the constant air raid sirens and night strikes in recent weeks were too much for the dog.
Lena’s mother went back to Ukraine. She missed her husband, Lena’s stepfather. He has a dacha, they have a vegetable garden. Lena’s husband’s parents also remained in Ukraine. Both Lena and her husband send money back to their parents from what they earn in Austria. Lena explains, “I have everything I need: I have a roof over my head, I have a good job, and I have my family with me.” Her positivity is contagious as she describes her new life, the nature in the local village and in the Tirolean mountains (“although I come from the seaside I never thought I could love the mountains this much”). Lena and her family are so incredibly grateful to the local family who helped them in Tirol. She knows how lucky she is to have made this connection via her niece and her long-distant cold call letter writing. She explains most Ukrainians are very hard working, they do not want to sit still, and want to show by their own examples how they are ready to take care of themselves if given the opportunity.
The church bells ring again in the background and I thank Lena for her time, adding that when someone works full time their “free” time is even more valuable. I thank her for sharing 90 minutes of it with me, and with all of you. She sends me back several heart emojis, and the photos I am sharing with you here.