No War

Last night a legendary Russian rock group played in Vienna with a strong anti-war message. At the same time, I have been receiving desperate messages from the civilian victims of war.

The legendary Russian rock group DDT played in Vienna last night, to what looked like a nearly sold-out audience. I had seen the group play decades ago, while I was a student in Washington DC, and if my memory serves me correctly (there were no photos or Instagram back then), we even went for beers with the band afterwards, that’s how small the performance was. What I didn't know, until I started reading this morning, was the biography of lead singer-songwriter, the legendary Yury Shevchuk, who despite being already 66 years old, played a full two and a half hour set last night.

Yury was born in one of the most remote parts of the former Soviet Union (Magadan region, primarily known for being home to prison labor camps and mining of minerals like gold to a Ukrainian father and a Tatar mother. He then grew up in Ufa. He told us last night, and the Wikipedia page reaffirms this, that the first war he protested was back in 1980, when he wrote a song against the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and was called into the local police station for a “talk”. Yury has been protesting ever since, it would seem, from his biography. What is not clear to me is I think, from reading the entries from the past few years, is that he has not left Russia. He told the audience last night he would go back to his dacha in the village (I didn’t catch the name), and start writing new songs. He performed a lot of new material last night, including new anti-war songs, one about drones, another called the “funeral of wars”.

Russians, as Yury said, now spread out across all corners of the world, these days have to acknowledge the war, speak out against it, and repeatedly say they are against the suffering of innocent people, before a concert or cultural event can progress. At least this is now the norm for all Russian events outside of Russia. Ukrainian flags were waved at the end. The crowd was older, nostalgic for the songs of their youth, and also welcoming the opportunity to come together. I could not tell you how many Ukrainians were in the audience, but I am sure there were several. DDT was a real rock band whose popularity was not limited to the borders of the Russian Federation.

Just as I was getting ready to go to the concert, I started to receive quite upset text messages from a mother here with her husband, who lost his leg, and her son, who also lost his leg, and her daughter. The family has been living for months in a hotel for refugees in Vienna, four to a room, meals “fed” to them in the cafeteria. She expressed deep frustration that after months and months of beginning, there is no progress that she can measure towards convincing the authorities (half the battle is even figuring out who is in charge and has authority to issue new housing orders for the family) that the family need new housing, somewhere they can cook for themselves and not live four to a room. Remember, everyone living in such “hotels” only receives €40 per month pocket money, because the state argues it is feeding them. In short, this woman was really, really upset. I spent 90 minutes texting with her, leaving her voice messages (this is a very Ukrainian form of communication, over Telegram, which I still find easier than phone calls, because you can somehow do other stuff in between), giving the only suggestions I know how to give: contact the federal authorities, here is the email address, maybe try emailing the mayor’s office if you are getting nowhere with the housing authority?

The mom told me a newspaper wrote about the family on September 17, 2023. I found the article. I sent her the photos.

I offered to write about her situation on social media. I put out a brief thread on X with translations of her messages to me. Unfortunately, it didn’t really get many clicks. These situations shock no one anymore. We are in year three of a horrible war, and not just one war, and the good housing ran out, by my estimates, sometime in the summer of 2022. Which means, as I explained to this mom and wife, that some families received social housing early on who are not as needy as those arriving later, but now the supply is gone and new supply has not been made available. The official line, which I was told from a federal agency this morning, is that they are aware of the family and it is simply really really difficult to find barrier-free housing in Austria. Which I find very strange given I cannot remember the last time I entered a building which had no lift at all, and I know dorms which have lifts, and common kitchens. So I really do not know if the bottleneck is a lack of will to push something through bureaucracy with rules designed for failure, or if really someone just keeps dropping this ball arguing a family which is clearly experiencing PTSD, as anyone would in their situation, should be fine with living 4 people to a hotel room with extremely little funds and being “fed” for months on end.

My last message was — for the record, I am worried about them. Yesterday, I received two Hofer cards from a kind donor in Salzburg, and today I turned around and sent them to this family. I told the mom that I cannot help you with an apartment, but at least now you can buy some fresh produce. It is not a solution, but a gesture, which shows her that some people do care, even if our hands are tied because we have no influence over the “powers that be”.

Speaking of that, this is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. The entire ecosystem of state jobs which a normal economy could do entirely without, and yet they exist to push vulnerable people around from A to B to C without really any concrete productive results, but they serve their purpose: to create many well-paying government jobs for locals. It is like Kafka, just modern, with internet. They still love their paper. I was at a doctor recently, helping translate for a blind woman who needs to prove she is blind (yes, really), and he was annoyed she didn’t come with a folder full of papers. She was told by the secretary (very rude, government office), that she has only one week to scan and send everything. Meanwhile this woman told me that the government agency for “integration” has actually approved an €8000 budget (yes, you read that correctly) for her to learn German in a special class for blind people, except the language school which is supposed to offer this special class has failed to do so since November. And no the Ukrainian has no idea how to make it happen. And I end up sounding like a stuck record: go there again and ask again.

Sometimes it takes a dozen phone calls to move the smallest thing here, and everyone you speak with acts like they are doing you a personal favour, rather than their job. Many appointments you can only make by telephone, you cannot email, or if you do, good luck getting an answer. This is challenging if you are still unsure in your German. In short — I really do not know how many of them manage.

But then there are wonderful things. I visited a school this week to translate for a mother of an autistic boy. The family is from Kharkiv. The school is a special “inclusion” class meaning three kids with challenges in school are in a normal classroom but accompanied by their own special teacher. We spoke for a whole hour, in great detail, and with much care, about the boy. I have never ever been to such a positive school meeting in my years of raising three kids in Austrian schools. It was so beautiful. I wanted to bottle it and share the experience with everyone. And yet, so much is luck, and many kids are unlucky. Another family contacted me. The teacher wants their boy to transfer to a school for handicapped children. But he is not handicapped. He doesn’t talk much, and may have some learning difficulties. In short, as one specialist told us, often this is the case when teachers don’t want to deal with immigrant kids with challenges — they recommend “special” schools for them. I was pretty surprised. It seems so brazen. And yet…

This week Austria is focused on a spy scandal. If you can read in German, do read this in its entirety. I’ll try to summarise very briefly. There is an Austrian who was working for the security services here now known to have been spying for the Russians. He was allowed to have access to secret stuff for sometime, despite the suspicions. He was working with Marsalek of Wirecard infamy. The story gets even better. The wife of the current Chancellor of Austria once rocked a canoe so hard on an outing that the mobile phones of several officials fell into the water (yes, really), and then these were apparently “dried with rice” (yes, really) and then passed to the Russians. The officials included the then head of the entire refugee response for Austria in the summer of 2022. Need I say more?

I have heard for some time rumours that NGOs do no background checks and often hire Russian speakers from Russia, some of whom are surely low-level agents, to work with Ukrainian refugees in Austria. Meanwhile, folks like me, get job rejection after job rejection (yes, really). That they do not vet on a small level, even when the person has access to databases with Ukrainian passport detail, is perhaps sloppy but unsurprising, but here we have fingers pointing to the highest levels of government, and there is no indication that this is really truly being taken seriously. Is it too late? Chancellor Nehammer will convene a national security meeting on April 9, but this was already on the calendar. If the far right do well in elections this fall, that is basically letting Putin set up camp without firing a single shot. And that is not an unlikely scenario. I don’t hear shock beyond the Twittersphere. Ordinary people, it seems, probably could care less about Russian spies. And therein lies the problem. Few understand war until they are confronted with the unimaginable reality. As one Ukrainian said to me yesterday, who in Europe will fight? Maybe Poland, maybe the Baltics. The others? Forget it.

So as Yury Shevchuk said to us last night: who knows what tomorrow will bring. And he didn’t say it with an optimistic tilt. Nowadays the fear is what tomorrow could bring. The hope is gone. And that is incredibly sad.

I am reading now this book about western journalists in central Europe nearly 100 years ago, and the parallels are uncanny. Vienna and Austria don’t sound all that different than today. They too in the 1930s didn’t know what was around the corner, but the war and Hitler’s murders of Jews and invasions of his neighbours also didn’t come out of nowhere. Today, we also know what might happen if Putin keeps marching, Trump wins, and China happily watches from afar. And yet, what can any of us do about that now?

The answer, people keep telling me, is to live your live in these moments now, precisely because you do not know what tomorrow will bring. So last night I paid far more than I could afford for a ticket to hear a legend in person, and I am so glad that I did. Here is one clip from the show, it is a song about autumn: