Oksana
The seventh in a new series of first person interviews with Ukrainians now living in Austria.
Oksana (38) wrote me recently expressing an interest in sharing her overwhelmingly positive story about moving to Austria as a result of the Russian invasion. “I am being helped by a local Austrian family. I found a job in my profession.” We agreed to meet when she and her 13 year-old daughter returned from a brief visit to see her husband in Kyiv. Oksana met me in the early evening at Westbahnhof, a central Vienna train station, which she commutes through each day, one and a half hours in each direction, from her home in a small town in Lower Austria to her new job in Vienna. We took a seat at an outdoor table at the very busy top floor McDonalds, ordered a couple cold drinks, and Oksana began to recall her journey from Ukraine to Austria.
Oksana and her family lived in Hostomel’, the town just outside of Kyiv best known for its military airport and home to the world-famous Mriya aircraft which the Russians destroyed in 2022. Oksana was an engineer with Antonov and worked on the Mriya. She had worked for the company for sixteen years. She, her husband, and her daughter, then 12, lived in a second floor apartment in a nine-story building which directly faced the runway of the airport.
When the Russian invasion began on February 24, Hostomel’ was the first point of entry where the Russians began landing troops. By 3pm, there were Russian soldiers going door to door inside Oksana’s apartment building, telling residents “to leave”. But where should they go to with a war raging outside? Oksana recalls packing only documents and warm clothes, fearing they may have to walk a long way outside, in the forest. They didn’t even take their computers with them. As they walked outside of their building it was so scary, everything was burning around them. There were armed Russian soldiers standing everywhere. Oksana, her husband, and her daughter set off on foot, and then a car stopped and helped them. They asked to be driven to a nearby village where they could stay with friends. The airport was burning.
The friends in the village also wanted to leave for a safer part of Ukraine. Oksana first thought to to go her mother who was living in a village 70 kilometres from Kyiv, in the direction of Borodyanka. The friends agreed to drop the family there. More Russians had arrived at this point, and Oksana describes the “non-ethnically Russian” faces of those soldiers. I ask if it was perhaps the Buryats or the Kadyrovtsi? She isn’t sure. They covered the passenger car in white sheets to indicate it was carrying civilians. They had to weave their way through backroads as many bridges were already damaged. Oksana and her family lived with her mother for five days in the Borodyanka region. Cell phone coverage was patchy. She could not sleep. Her 74 year-old mother stubbornly refused to leave a la “this is my land”. Oksana spoke with a neighbour of her mother and asked him to drive them and his own girlfriend to safety. He agreed, and they passed by more burning villages on the way to Zhytomyr. But there were no trains running from Zhytomyr; they carried on to Vinnytsia.
Trains were running from Vinnytsia, and a packed evacuation train Kharkiv-Lviv had just arrived at the station. Oksana’s husband urged her and their daughter to get on it, saying he would stay behind. Most important that they head west. An elderly man opened the door to the train car which had stopped only briefly, and Oksana and her daughter pushed themselves on board. It was standing room only. Her daughter then slept on top of their bags on the floor. Oksana stood the five or six hours it took the train to reach Lviv. In Lviv, the train station was packed, but there were volunteers. They were told buses would head west to Europe but only early in the morning. Oksana was too scared to fall asleep. After all, you are holding all your valuables on you and there is a sea of strangers all around.
In the morning, Oksana did not manage to find a spot on a free evacuation bus, but she and another mom she befriended did find paid tickets on a bus to Poland. Oksana’s best friend, the godmother to her daughter, told her if she got to Poland she could stay with a friend. She gave Oksana the name of the village, explained which commuter train to take from the border town. This Polish woman welcomed them, but explained she could not host them for long. She did, however, suggest a friend in Austria, in a town which has a school. Oksana agreed, while not really knowing at all what she was agreeing to. Their Polish host helped them buy tickets to Lower Austria, and their new Austrian host met them at the station.
Oksana and her daughter were invited to live in half of a house, on a hill, in a small town in Lower Austria. The hosts were a mother, a pensioner, and her adult daughter, who had lit candles and a fire and tried to make the place feel welcoming. They filled the fridge with food, and for three months the families communicated via Oksana’s “broken” (I doubt that actually) English. Their local hosts helped Oksana navigate the bureaucracy and paperwork of her early days in Austria. They drove her to St. Pölten and to register her daughter for school. Oksana’s daughter was given a place in a local middle school, and a school bus was even arranged to take her in the mornings. At first, she was the only Ukrainian in the school. Later, two boys and a girl joined. Therefore, these Ukrainian kids are lucky — they are in normal Austrian classrooms.
Oksana describes an adjustment period for her daughter, learning what teachers’ expectations are here. They both had to learn German from zero. Their local hosts organized many social activities for the Ukrainian families in the town to get together and meet locals. There were even information sessions held in the local mayor’s office where one could ask questions in person. They received vouchers for clothing stores, and volunteers asked which kids needed new shoes, and in what size.
Oksana signed up for German language classes, which she says were very good, and it was an all-Ukrainian group she attended with. She completed both A1 and A2, but by the time she signed up for B1, she felt as if she could no longer tread water. German was hard and she felt she had hit a wall. She was depressed living on modest benefit payments. She was desperate to work. Any work. So, Oksana, acting alone and without any advisors, opened the internet. And she began to look at online job postings in her profession: design engineering. She did have a CV in German, as this had been one of the things they had worked on in German class. She had sought some help to correctly name the technical terms in German of her work experience.
Oksana sent her CV to four open positions, and received one invitation to come interview in person. She prepared all on her own, printing out information already translated into German about the past projects she had worked on and the programs and technical knowledge she has experience in. She managed as much of the interview as she could alone in German, and then the kind interviewer called in a Ukrainian who had been hired into another department, and this person acted as “translator” for the rest of the job interview.
To her amazement — Oksana was offered the job. The company (she asked me not to name it here, explaining, there her colleagues know her as a work colleague and not as a “refugee”) has a large office in Vienna with a multinational staff of engineers. Oksana is now working in the same program she worked in at Antonov, but in German. Oksana completed a trial first month, and has now been working full-time with this engineering company for four months. She likes the people, she likes her boss, she hopes she has impressed them with her speed and knowledge. Oksana worked for Antonov for 16 years, 14 of which in this specific design program. The work she is being asked to do in Austria is technically easier than airplanes — pipes, fittings.
The conversation turns to free time and Oksana is grateful to her local Austrian hosts for always trying to invite the Ukrainians to local social events, festivals, celebrations. I get the impression their local hosts did not want them to sit home being sad in a new country, and instead really tried to integrate them socially in the true sense of the word. When they learned Oksana is a talented hobby knitter, many local women donated yarn and she was asked to knit stuffed animals for a local market sale.
I ask Oksana about her daughter, who from the sound of it, with her mom now working full-time, strikes me as a very independent 13 year-old. She is, Oksana agrees, but she had to be one in Ukraine, too. Both parents used to leave for work at 7am, and their daughter was in the “second shift” (many school buildings have two shifts due to more children than space) at school back home in Hostomel’. The teen is now managing Austrian school, followed by online Ukrainian school in the afternoons, and music — she asked for voice lessons this summer and travelled to Vienna on her own twice a week to practice singing in Ukrainian with a private tutor. Oksana describes to me a wonderful online further education program called “Intellect Ukraine” which her daughter used as a platform to do extra work in the Ukrainian school program, with notebooks accompanying featuring examples/homework/tests.
Oksana says her daughter can speak German well but she doesn’t want to. She would of course love to go home. It is hard to explain to a teen why such a huge change in one’s life is necessary right now. They don’t have an apartment to go back to. Russian soldiers lived in the building for a month and ruined everything. They stole everything, even down to the lid on a teapot. Oksana’s husband now lives with friends in Kyiv. Finding work is hard. What is available often doesn’t pay more than what you would need to earn to cover rent on a rental apartment in Kyiv. We talk about Oksana’s recent visit home to Kyiv. It was hard to say goodbye, again, to her husband and her mom. Her mom will not leave Ukraine. Oksana tells me about pensioners from Ukraine she knows in Lower Austria. It isn’t easy for the older people.
Oksana commutes half an hour by train from Lower Austria to Vienna. Door to door her entire commute is 90 minutes. She wakes up at 5:20am on weekdays. She does not have to micro-manage her daughter. She is able to get herself off to school and feed herself when she comes home. And, of course, manage homework and lessons for two schools. Oksana appears to have a supervisory role but it does not sound like helicopter parenting. Many of her daughter’s classmates from Hostomel’ are now abroad — they dial in for online lessons from Poland, Germany, Austria.
Oksana describes to me what it was like to be back in Kyiv recently. The more girlfriends you talk with, the more you hear about so and so’s boyfriend fighting on the front, or relative, or those who have already lost love ones in the war. The topic is unavoidable and omnipresent. You try to move on with life and normal routines “for the sake of your kids”. But it isn't easy. Oksana remembers telling herself in those early days “you have to eat” as if it is something she could have just as easily stopped doing. She has friends here now, a girlfriend she will go out for drinks with, see what is happening culturally in Vienna. They tried to see a movie during the outdoor film festival on Rathaus; it ended up being a classical music concert instead. I suggest the Viennale this fall. Oksana tells me about the magical experience of watching a Ukrainian cartoon for kids in a cinema in Vienna recently. A packed audience, delighted to hear Ukrainian on the big screen.
Oksana tells me of the four jobs she applied to, a second one did reply to her, but they explained they really needed B2 German for the role. She is extremely grateful to have found a job so easily, and I am left with the impression she understands how rare this is, as a Ukrainian refugee, to be given the opportunity to work in your profession here in Austria, despite not having fluent German yet. Oksana is extremely positive: about her job, her circumstances, her luck at being helped by kind people. She does not complain, and gets excited telling me it will be autumn soon, you can then go mushroom picking in the forests of Lower Austria, do I know the big white ones you can gather? I must admit, I have no clue about mushroom gathering.
I am amazed by Oksana’s energy levels, her determination, her positive attitude, and that as a working mom she seems to be monitoring her daughter’s educational progress as well as if not better than many moms who are at home and have much more time for this. But Oksana is someone who has worked hard her whole life, and for her this is all just normal. The having a lot of free time and only attending German classes — that part was abnormal. She can be very proud of herself and what she has achieved in so little time. And yet another example of self-help. It wasn’t an NGO or AMS or any other semi-state bureaucratic institution which helped Oksana find a good job in her profession.
It was Oksana herself. Austria is lucky to have her and her daughter here.