Marina & Karina
Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting Marina, originally from Kharkiv, now volunteering there times a week with the non-profit Matusya in Vienna.
I have had the pleasure of meeting many incredible people since February 24, 2022, and one of them is Lera Kaiser, founder of the non-profit Matusya, which is housed within Diakonie’s Ukraine consulting office, and three times per week offers humanitarian aid to mothers and children from Ukraine now living in Vienna. I visited Matusya for the first time a few months ago, to collect donations for our book & bake sale. There I met Marina, who remembered me, and thanked me for the Hofer card I had given her many months prior. Marina agreed to meet with me yesterday, and share her personal story, how she and her daughter came from Kharkiv to Vienna, what they have been up to, and their outlook for the future.
It was a hot, sticky afternoon, and we took a seat next to a thankfully very open large window in a cafe on a busy shopping street. A breeze blew threw from the courtyard, and we ordered two lemonades. Marina is tiny and it is hard to tell how old she is. I didn’t ask. She has the infectious energy of a 25 year old, yet is here raising her 10 year old daughter Karina alone. Her mother stayed behind in Ukraine, moving to a friend’s place in Dnipro region, taking Marina’s dog with her. None of them could stay in Kharkiv as they shared an apartment in the city center and lived on the top floor. It was an eight-minute walk on foot to the nearest shelter — a subway station.
Mother and daughter left Kharkiv in early March 2022. Her boyfriend (more on P later) drove them all the way to the Ukraine-Poland border. They stayed briefly in Poland, had thought about joining a friend in Baden-Baden, Germany, but soon heard the famous resort town had been “closed” to refugees, and a friend of a friend suggested Marina and her daughter could go to Vienna, and stay with a Frenchman until they found housing. So they came here. Marina had never been to Austria before. She did not know German, and her English is not confident. The apartment was in the 3rd district, and by June their host said they would need to find another place to live by the end of the month. I didn’t pry for details, but it sounded like so many stories from that time: well-meaning locals opened the doors to their own homes to help women and children fleeing literal bombs, without thinking about the length of the commitment. By June, there was no social housing available via Diakonie. The times of Austrians donating apartments for refugees had dried up.
Marina met several female volunteers, local residents of Vienna with Ukrainian- and/or Russian-speaking roots, and they helped her through those first months here, with both advice and donations of household items. Marina began, together with a girlfriend, a Ukrainian mom with a 12 year old daughter, to search for an apartment in Vienna. They contacted the landlord of a two-room apartment in the 7th district, advertised for €800 per month. The two mothers hoped they could stretch together €400 each (Caritas does give €330 per family for rent support for those in Grundversorgung if a contract is provided). When the landlord arrived, an entrepreneur with a jewellery store in the first district (an individual who it turns out actually advised my own kid on a recent business project at school — Vienna is a village), he took one look at the two moms with two daughters and agreed to let them live rent-free, as long as they pay for utilities. He did check their blue cards, to make sure they are from war zones. Marina from Kharkiv, her friend from Horlivka, Donetsk region — it was clear they were not amongst the category of Ukrainians who fled relatively “safe” areas. The women could not believe their luck, and agreed immediately.
Karina, 10, attends a local Volksschule and is in 3rd grade for the second time. Last summer, the school suggested she repeat third grade, to improve her language skills. This year, Marina beamed with pleasure as she explained, Karina passed the MIKA-D German test for which she had to go to the director’s office, and has been told she can move to 4th grade in the fall. Karina is in a normal Austrian classroom, and is then pulled from that class for one and a half hours per day for extra German in an “integration” group. The group is filled with children of different nationalities. Marina says the “Arab” children (I pressed on which nationality and she could not specify) tease the Ukrainians, showing them Russian flags and the like. I asked why such animosity? Marina suggested something I had never heard of, other than the usual blaming the newcomer. Those who have been granted asylum cannot travel for five years, while the Ukrainians travel back and forth freely to their home country. Karina made a friend in her class, a young girl whose family comes from India, but she grew up in Vienna. A new boy arrived, not speaking any German. Karina is now the teacher’s “translator”, a role she has proudly taken on.
So how do you manage, I ask Marina, you receive only a little money from the Austrian government, you volunteer three times a week, attend German courses, but how does it work financially, even if you don’t have to pay rent, without a job?
Savings, she says. So I ask about what she did in Kharkiv. Marina is excited to talk about her former job. She clearly both loved it and was very good at it. Marina worked for an interior ministry medical clinic and was in charge of data entry for everything from vaccination certificates to medical inspections for drivers’ licenses. Even soldiers at local bases used to come to the medical center for routine vaccinations. Marina studied economics and learned the data management systems. Everything was digital, and connected to Diia. She was a valued employee, she loved her work, and the environment — a big, busy workplace interacting with people all day long.
By the end of 2022, the ministry asked all the employees who had left Ukraine to resign. They had not been receiving salaries since the war broke out, but their jobs had been protected. Marina had to give up this job security when she decided to stay in Austria going into 2023. She manages at the moment on a combination of Grundversorgung, the child benefit (Familienbeihilfe), and her own savings. She is trying to get Karina’s father to pay some kind of child support. They have been separated for four years and he is working in Poland.
Marina has passed A1 German and will sign up for A2. She doesn’t speak English well. She spends most of her time volunteering at Matusya. She works all three days the center is open each week, for several hours each shift. Why, I say? Why help others as a volunteer when you don’t have a job yourself?
“I cannot sit at home. I would go crazy,” Marina explains. “And where can I work without German? This way I am at least useful.”
Several volunteers at Matusya also work three days a week; others take on fewer shifts. On an average day, they provide non-food aid to 80 children per day. Moms are asked not to come back more often than biweekly, but Marina admits some do come more often, out of desperation. The most popular items are diapers, baby wipes, porridge, baby formula, strollers, bottles, toys, used clothes, deodorant, feminine hygiene products, washing machine detergent, shampoo and body soap. All of these items are portioned out and rationed.
Do you think you will stay in Austria? I ask gently, adding that no one knows yet what the EU will say to Ukrainian citizens from March 2024.
“I don’t think Kharkiv will stay Ukrainian.”
I am pretty shocked by this answer. Kharkiv was never occupied by the Russians, at least not yet.
Marina explains. Kharkiv is an industrial city. There are several strategic enterprises, none of which were bombed. The Russians bombs universities, apartment buildings, but they did not touch the factories.
I stop to think and realize Marina is not only factually right about what was bombed, but I have never heard this pointed out by anyone before.
I ask Marina how she settled into an empty apartment. Volunteers. For one and half months she slowly gathered pieces of furniture and household items from a network of volunteers she befriended early on. I observe Marina’s intuitive people skills are really helping her navigate a new life in a new city in which she does not yet speak the language. She is a natural extrovert, and a natural optimist, and I think, it has been my experience, that these people are more likely to receive help from volunteers. There is a natural human tendency to pull away or distance oneself from difficult, depressive situations.
Marina talks about the mothers who visit Matusya. They are all different. Some come to ask for help because something went wrong with their payments from Austria which disappeared or stopped and no one knows why. Others have no homes in Ukraine to return to. She mentions a mother from occupied Luhansk.
I ask Marina if she ever volunteered before, in Ukraine.
Yes.
When the war broke out in 2014, many refugees from Slovyansk, Donestk region arrived in Kharkiv. Back then, Karina was a baby, and Marina gathered baby clothes and necessities with a girlfriend who had twins, and brought it all to a center that was trying to help mothers and children who just arrived from the war zone. Marina explained that many internally displaced persons who fled Donbas back then, when the war first began, faced difficulties in other parts of Ukraine. Many landlords in Kyiv did not want to rent to families from Donbas, suspecting they might be “separatists”, although as Marina explains that was nonsense, as anyone who wanted to leave for Russia could have gone. Those families chose Ukraine, and felt themselves shunned in some cities.
“Dnipro, Kharkiv, Sumy, Odesa — we all took in many IDPs from Donetsk and Luhansk back then.”
Kharkiv pre-war was a city of 1.5 million. Saltivka, which was pummelled by Russian rockets, was alone home to 400,000 people. Marina recalls that people lived in cellars for months. Yet she has become close with another volunteer who is from Lviv. They do not discuss each other’s reasons for coming to Austria. We talk about the economic situation in Ukraine now, how many have lost their jobs or seen their salaries slashed, while consumer and food inflation is crazy.
I ask about her mother. How does she survive on her pension alone? She receives 2000 Hryvnia per month as an IDP. She has to show her documents that she was a Kharkiv resident, now in Dnipro region. They also bring vans with humanitarian food aid. You have to show residency papers (original, pre-war) from Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kherson or Zaporozhye to qualify.
The medical clinic Marina worked at was bombed and is closed, but the interior ministry hospital is still working, with a smaller staff.
I delicately circle back to Marina’s life here, and ask about her personal life. Has she met anyone in Austria?
She already has someone, she explains. She pulls out her phone and shows me a photo. It is a tall, strong Ukrainian solider in uniform, somewhere in the fields. In multiple fields. With multiple drones and pieces of equipment I do not understand.
P, she says.
He drove Marina and Karina to the border in March 2022. She has not seen him since. He volunteered last September. He had civilian experience with drones, and is now a drone operator, working on things like Starlink. He spent two months in Bakhmut without telling Marina. He told her at the time they were being sent to Kramatorsk so she would not worry.
Bakhmut has become a word you utter in Russian or Ukrainian and it is followed by horrified silence.
P texted when he was rotated out of Bakhmut that he never thought he would see Kharkiv again. Marina hands me her phone and I read their text messages back and forth. I am stunned. He is now somewhere in Ukraine on his next mission. He is operating these things that look like mini airplanes. “Each one is worth $100,000,” Marina explains.
I explain I don’t want to use P’s photos as I don’t want to expose anything of military significance.
I think about how many Ukrainian women I have met who have husbands and boyfriends on the front lines, and how usually that is the first thing they mention. Marina didn’t want my (or anyone else’s) pity, so she didn’t mention it until asked. Once I asked, she proudly showed me photos and told me about the critical work P is doing in the field. We talk briefly about the able-bodied Ukrainian men sitting out the war in fancy restaurants in EU countries. Night and day.
I ask Marina if they knew in Kharkiv, back in February 2022, that there would be a war. Yes, she says. We knew there were troops building on the border. Some people at work stocked up on gas and petrol. Some speculated Ukraine might quickly handover Donbas, Crimea. No one really expected the attack on Kyiv like it unfolded. Marina recalls the “red sky” over Kharkiv at 5am that night. Her daughter had a best friend in Kharkiv. The mother was from Luhansk. For her, it was her second war.
I pay for our lemonades and we get up in search of the ladies’ room. I thank Marina for her time and her openness. I admire her lack of anxiety, her lack of worry — she seemed genuinely to be at peace with her current situation, living in the present rather than overly worrying about what the future might hold. She told me how she originally signed Karina up for gymnastics, but then it was too expensive, the club wanted €150 per month, so instead mother and daughter now go to a public swimming pool for exercise. I mention my daughter’s swim team, that we now have Ukrainian coaches, and it is more affordable than gymnastics. Perhaps in September, Marina answers.
Do you want to go home to see P? Have you been home since you left? They don’t get any time off, Marina explains. She has not been home yet. She left behind her dog with her mother on purpose, so her mother would not miss Marina and Karina too much.
I really admire the inner strength of people like Marina who take everything in stride, do not expect an ounce of pity, and recall events in a matter-o-fact way. Usually the Ukrainians I meet with the supermarket gift card program are different. They are often from very poor backgrounds, very uncomfortable in a new country, and overwhelmed with despair, loneliness, and sadness. My conversation with Marina was not like that at all. I walked away thinking she could teach me a thing or two about navigating life. So much of it is just the attitude that everything will be ok and everything is possible.
Not much money? She shops in social supermarkets. One is near her house. Oh, I say, but I was there once, there wasn’t much worth buying inside. She shrugs. She makes it work. “Prices have also gone up so much in Ukraine. It was before that you could have a really good life on a normal salary…”
I thank Marina for her time. We say goodbye in the hot sun. She will walk home. I will run to the subway to head to yet another parental school event (they never seem to end at the end of the academic year). Marina gives me a little hug. She is petite but full of spirit. So much spirit.
I promise to come visit Matusya again sometime. I explain that after my first visit I observed why I prefer working alone — I am easily drained in a large group of women all talking at the same time for an extended period of time. Marina looks at me and explains her old job was filled with people all the time, both colleagues and customers, and she loved it. Some of us get energy from people, others feel drained by people. What an interesting contrast. It just shows each of us can help in our own way, the way that suits us best.