Masha & family: An Update
A young family, originally from Kharkiv, now in a tiny town in Austria near the Czech border. I first wrote about them last December. Names changed for privacy.
You can read the first part of their story here. Masha contacted me recently and offered an “update” on her family.
About a month ago, Masha reached out to me and offered an update on her family. I was travelling, she was about to go on a long-awaited vacation, and we finally found time to speak by phone yesterday evening. Do read the first part of this family’s story here.
Masha and Dima are now both working. Dima works full time at a factory which produces pet food. It is very near to the Czech border, and therefore has quite a linguistically-diverse employee base. For this reason, Masha jokes, Dima isn’t making as fast progress with German as she is. Slavic languages seem to be the common denominator amongst Dima’s work colleagues. They speak German with the bosses.
November and December were very hard, Masha recalls, as Dima had just started working, and once he did, the family immediately lost their social payments. The €330 monthly subsidy towards rent, €215 per adult, and €100 for their eight year-old daughter, Anna, immediately disappeared. Dima works 40 hour weeks doing physical labor at the factory. He and others are grateful for the job. Masha explains in neighbouring Czechia, men are often working 10-12 hour days for just €1000 per month. At the moment, Dima’s full time position pays him between €1,500 and €1,800 after tax, depending on the month and how much work there was. There are night and early morning shifts, too. It is hard work but he is grateful to have it.
Dima drives to work in the old car the family left Ukraine in. They are hoping the car survives a little bit longer. They don’t have the funds yet to buy a new used car. This summer, Dima ordered car parts, and fixed the car up himself. He is handy like that, Masha explains. They recently bought a used dishwasher for €50 and Dima installed it in their rental kitchen. The family share a small 30 square metre apartment which they rent for €400 including utilities. They are dreaming of renting something bigger, with a garden, and maybe getting a dog. So far they saw only one place for €600 per month before utilities, but with no garden. Masha will wait and tell all her local friends that her family is looking for something bigger. In a small town, word travels fast, and it is important that you are viewed as a person of trust. She hopes she and Dima have shown this to the local population: both going to work, paying taxes, their daughter tries hard in school. This is a family consciously focused on integrating itself.
Anna, the couple’s daughter, attends second grade, and is the only Ukrainian in her class. She is in a “normal” Austrian classroom, and by now speaks German without an accent. Anna made a friend in her class, and Masha mentioned to the friend’s mother that she was looking for work. This mother suggested a local hotel, and promised to ask the boss, which she did. Masha worked for a few days in February, helping at events as kitchen staff, and was then offered a permanent position from April. For 20 hours per week she is paid €820 before taxes, €670 after. Masha says there may be a possibility to have some of these taxes refunded as she will be a low earner for the year, but only in 2024.
Masha works in the hotel’s restaurant, usually on the breakfast shift. The boss insisted that she be able to understand his and others’ German, but did not expect her to speak fluently when she was hired. Sometimes they ask her to help with baking, a passion of Masha’s. During the summer, there was a lot of work, and Masha worked more hours, sometimes 30 or 40 per week. Masha asked her mother to come from Transdnistria, where both she and Dima grew up, to watch Anna. Masha’s mother, who “had never been anywhere” came to Austria for two and a half months to provide childcare over the summer. Now that school has started again and grandmother has returned home, Dima and Masha share duties of getting Anna ready for school in the morning, dependant on who has the earlier morning shift. Sometimes Dima leaves for work at 5am. Sometimes Masha doesn’t have to arrive until 8am.
Anna is in the school’s lunch and aftercare program four days per week. Lunches cost €60 per month (€4.80 per day) and aftercare costs the family €88 per month for four afternoons. Masha is very grateful for this opportunity as it allows Anna to be in a German-speaking environment for the entire day. She says now Anna speaks with no accent, and you could not tell, if you heard her, that she did not grow up here.
The family only arrived from Ukraine in May 2022. Incredible linguistic progress.
Masha is not sure what the winter will look like. She may be laid off from her job once the tourism season comes to an end, and she will not qualify for unemployment as she has not worked 12 months of a 24 month period. She plans to use the winter, if there is no work, to study German more intensely, and get an Austrian drivers’ license. She has not yet learned to drive, and wants to do it correctly, but this is a big expense — about €1,500 for drivers’ school and lessons. Masha wants to learn the right way. She says when they first moved here, Dima also read the road rules online to make sure he knew any ways in which Austria differed from Ukraine, for motorists.
Both Masha and Dima are studying German on their own, at home, and online with a teacher who is still in Kharkiv. In person German classes would be a long drive (45 km) for them, and they simply don’t have the time with work. Masha would really like to pass the German exams in the different levels, and will do this once she feels ready. She already knows where she has to go in Vienna to ask to take an A2 test.
Masha knows she is very lucky with Anna and her school. Anna started first grade last year at the age of seven, so a year older than her classmates, but never had to spend a day in an integration class, as the town is small and there is none. Masha tells me about a Ukrainian family with children of a similar age who live in a nearby town where there is an integration class, and those kids, unfortunately, probably through no fault of their own, have learned very little German so far. Masha also supports Anna with additional online tutoring in German from the same teacher in Kharkiv.
Masha and Dima would like to stay in Austria. They have talked about their long-term goals. They know why they sometimes stay up until 2 AM learning German. They know why they pay out of pocket for extra German lessons online. They know why they want to pass German language exams and receive certificates. They know why they plan to go through the long and complicated process of having their Ukrainian diplomas translated and “approved” by Austria on par with local degrees. They are clearly playing the long game.
Dima is able to be here because Anna has a rare medical condition (and he is therefore the father of a child with an illness which allowed him to leave Ukraine) which requires her to take expensive hormone injections. These are administered biannually by the family doctor, and the rest of the time, Masha must take Anna to the AKH in Vienna to have the medicine administered there. Masha is very grateful for the medical care they have received here. Masha is, overall, extremely grateful to Austria and says they have only really met kind, nice people along the way. But she admits she herself is a positive person by nature. Maybe this helps. I agree wholeheartedly. Those Ukrainians who have bad luck seem to have it in spades, and those who are lucky also seem to attract the right kind of people to them who can help make life in Austria that much easier.
Masha did have a situation at work recently in which a work colleague who had been at the job for over a decade tried to really control her every move. Masha felt like she couldn’t work like that. So she did the grown-up thing, and talked to the boss about it. And the boss, clearly a flexible person and a good manager, talked to the veteran and said please don’t micromanage Masha, and things actually improved.
Recently, Anna’s class stopped by the hotel to use the playground, and her teacher was positively surprised to see Masha working in the hotel. “Good for you!” the teacher told Masha. Masha very clearly understands it is important for locals to see both parents working and contributing as taxpayers in their new country. She also knows how to ask for help, the kind people are not shy to offer. Masha asked the other parents if they might donate some children’s books in German for Anna, and she received many, which she duly returned after Anna had read them.
Masha recalls their first six months in Austria. It was hard, and she was really quite depressed, but at some point, she says, you realise you have to help yourselves because no one else can do it for you. Her husband Dima looked everywhere for odd jobs and work. It took him months and months to even find the factory job. He is an engineer by training, but would need all his degrees certified here in Austria before he might have a chance to apply for a more senior position at the factory, this time in an engineering role rather than working on the production line as he does now. Masha worked as a journalist and hobby baker in Ukraine, but you cannot, in Austria, legally hobby bake at home, and for journalism she would need C1 German, so for now, those thoughts are put on hold.
Masha and I talk about the uncertainty of the road ahead. The EU has extended the temporary protection status of Ukrainians for one more year, but no one knows what will happen after that. We know some Austrian ministers have hinted at future criteria such as knowledge of German and being legally employed as possible future criteria to be able to stay in Austria on something like a RWR card. Masha and Dima are definitely doing everything within their ability to be the living embodiment of a family working hard to integrate itself into Austrian life and contribute to their local community.
Anna is still doing Ukrainian school online, too, but Masha admits perhaps it is time to stop. It is an extra expense but their focus now is clearly on Austrian school. Masha and Dima would like to stay so badly in Europe that they even talked about what they might do if Austria says no to all Ukrainians in the future. A friend mentioned the possibility of a job in Switzerland. Maybe the German-speaking part of France? Masha knows other families are not integrating in the same way. She knows Ukrainians who work online at home and keep to themselves. But she says even after just one and a half years in Europe, you yourself change as a person. The new environment changes you whether you asked for it or not.
I ask Masha, rather bluntly, why they do not think they will ever go back to Ukraine.
“Because everything we built is gone. Literally, everything.”
Their apartment is gone. There jobs no longer exist. Both Dima and Masha have been working since they were 14, working non-stop to build something for themselves. They lost it all, and they cannot imagine starting from scratch, again. Masha tells me she does not wish to live through another post-war period. She looks at Austrian teens and would like Anna to have the same carefree life, filled with simple choices like where to work or study, not having to worry about how to provide for yourself, as Masha had to do since she was 17 and won a scholarship to study in Kharkiv, but her mother could only give her money for dorm rent. The rest Masha had to do entirely on her own. Both Masha and Dima’s parents are in Transdnistria, and the situation there is very difficult, she explains. They also have a responsibility to help their elderly parents financially. Both grew up very modestly and are not afraid of hard work.
This summer, after Dima fixed up their old car, the family took a dream vacation. Using their “13th salaries” (which Masha too was paid, even though she only began work in April), the family booked an Airbnb and drive 18 hours to Liguria, Italy, for a beach holiday on the coast near Genoa. One day Masha and Dima left Anna with her grandmothers and took the train to Nice (gorgeous!) and Monaco (nothing special!). We talk about the incredible turquoise waters of the Mediterranean in the south of France, about how welcoming Italians are of family tourists in the summer. The family also visited Salzburg, Hallstatt, the popular lakes of Mondsee and Attersee. Before this summer, the family had only ever taken package holidays to destinations like Turkey and Egypt. This driving through Europe in your own car to the sea was an entirely new and wonderful experience. Masha admits they spent all of their 13th salaries to do it, but it was so memorable. Anna had dreamed of one day seeing Italy after reading a lot about it. This summer, her dream came true. “Memories to last a lifetime” Masha writes me.
Masha and I talk about their work ethic. Both she and her husband have always had to rely only on themselves. We speak openly about how it is numerically impossible to survive on the benefits Austria pays out to Ukrainians. We agree we do not know how single mothers with small children are managing. She tells me they now spend €600 per month just on food to feed their family of three, and proudly explains they now can eat a healthy variety and a balanced diet, not restricting themselves on account of money. Sometimes they drive to shop in Czechia where it is cheaper. Masha shops for Anna at second hand children’s markets, explaining how locals line up early in the morning. There is no stigma in Austria against buying second hand, thankfully, and these “markets” mean Anna can choose for herself, just like in a shop.
I tell Masha how impressed I am with how much they have accomplished in relatively so little time. It definitely also sounds they like are only getting started. They have big plans, which I hope those in charge will be wise enough to not interfere with. By this I mean the bureaucrats who will one day decide which Ukrainians may stay and which must go home.
Masha writes me in the evening, after we get off the phone:
“I would like to say thank you to the Austrians who have been wonderful to our family, I have only had positive encounters, despite all the challenges (difficult work, not being able to live like you did before), we are so grateful to be here in safety, and that our daughter is living under peaceful skies and is receiving the medical care she requires. That is what is most important. Thank you.”
thanks Tanja for the update. " Anna had dreamed of one day seeing Italy." Such an important thing --to see the world-- and for Dima and Masha to be able to provide and experience this with and for Anna. It is nice to hear them upscaling their situation. Please let them know that someone from NYC is proud of them and is rooting for them.