Swimming against the current
It took me several days to piece these thoughts together. Navigating Austria's unpredictable bureaucracy for refugees is not for the faint hearted. Even the "helpers" cannot help in many cases.
This morning I opened my phone to a message from the mother of a 17 year-old boy who is in need of a liver transplant. But that wasn’t why she was writing. She was writing to ask me who might help her cover the €800 she was charged to pay for all the childhood vaccinations her son was required to receive before the transplant. Those were administered by a paediatrician since February. Her son coped with most of the shots fine, except one time he fell and hit his head and had to go to hospital. But that isn’t why she is writing. She writes me “we live in social housing, I asked our coordinator if they could help with the €800, they said they have no funds for this. She called the social fund, they also said no. We called the insurance, they also said no. I thought health insurance might at least cover part of the cost. I have all the receipts.”
So what do I do? I give the mom the contact of a kind person who works in the interior ministry on civilian, directly war-related medical evacuations (which this is not, of course), in the hopes that the kind bureaucrat might know something I don’t about sources of funds. Otherwise, I offer to help with crowd-funding, either amongst the Ukrainians in our group or on Twitter, but warn about the potential consequences of having €800 suddenly hit your bank account when you are on Grundversorgung (basic survival income, Austria’s categorisation for Ukrainians who ask for aid).
So this is just ten minutes of my morning. Then I think back to the phone call I received yesterday evening, from Tanya. I am grateful I was given useful contacts for her via Twitter, including of the Austrian embassy in Ukraine, and I send her a voice message reassuring her not to be afraid of local NGOs checking in on her and the baby. Many Ukrainian women have read horror stories of situations with the dreaded “Jugendamt” in DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), and are terrified of their kids potentially being taken away from them. And, it would seem, not entirely without reason.
As Tanya mentions these stories, I think to another message I read in my chat yesterday. This time from a mother in Lower Austria. Someone brought up the dreaded school topic, and this is what she told us, adding, “I won’t name the town here publicly but they all talk so politely, they are very tactful, they don’t make anything personal, do it all with a smile”. I immediately have this image of anti-immigrant Stepford Wives, Austrian countryside edition. Read what this mom told us yesterday. Imagine you fled war, only to have your real struggles and fight for your child begin in the new country you sought safety in:
A few evenings ago (it all becomes a blur because it never stops), I received really desperate messages from the mother of a 13 year-old in Vienna who had already switched schools from the 10th to 11th district, but that didn’t help, many of the Ukrainian kids moved away, her daughter is a good student in Ukrainian online school doing subjects like biology and chemistry, but the Vienna middle school insists on keeping her in a “integration” (irony off) class with 10 year-olds. I leave the mother voice messages. I say I understand the emotion and the frustration. I recommend to do whatever possible to try and switch schools. Maybe to find a gymnasium which could give the girl a chance? But this lies 100% on the mother. The state school assigned the Ukrainian child will do the minimum by law, the mother will have to manage the child to do both Ukrainian online school and try and find an option in Austria which will better suit her daughter’s emotional, social, and academic needs. The mother must be really upset because she doesn’t even write me back thank you for the little advice I did give her. I don’t take it personally.
It is such a huge ask that it is no wonder many pack up and go home. And I suppose that is what many here actually want. On paper, Austria is open. The reality though is doors constantly being slammed in your face until many Ukrainians shrug their shoulders and say they finally get the message: “go home”. More on School Woes here.
This week I also received desperate messages from two women, one in Upper Austria, and one in Vienna, who “did the right thing” and sought legal, paid employment, only to have it come back and slap them in the face financially.
In the Upper Austria case, a family of three, mom, dad and child, live in a “hotel” for refugees operated by a private individual, obviously a failed hotel operator in the private sector, who is now in the “refugee” business with the local government. Under Grundversorgung, the state, in this case Upper Austria, should pay out a certain amount of money per month per adult and per child. But the mom went to get a job, one that only pays her €280 per month, which she believes to be under the limit of how much she is allowed to earn while receiving state support (Zuverdienstgrenze, which by the way is not being universally applied across all nine Austrian states, some like Lower Austria have just said fuck off to the federal government and don’t implement the new law). So then the hotel owner only gives the family the €150 for the child for the month, but nothing for the parents, citing the state taking its time in making calculations. I check via a kind bureaucrat within the interior ministry who is helping us volunteers with such questions, and I am told, yes, it is true, Upper Austria sometimes takes months to make these calculations of how much earned vs. how much should not be paid out and in the meantime those people receive nothing.
So not only do you get an official response that mirrors the best of Kafka (“there are not enough employees to make the calculations”), but also zero explanation as to why the payments were also being withheld from families in the hotel who had not gone to work. What we have in Austria is a federal government that passes laws which are anyway shit to begin with but they are at least something tangible, and then each of the nine states decides what it will or won’t do in practice, in a totally in-transparent way, and then vulnerable people, in this case Ukrainian refugees, are left at the mercy of some low-level bureaucrat who takes two months to do 3rd grade math to figure out how much of this poor woman’s miserable wages the state will keep for itself.
At this point you want to open your cupboards and throw all your plates against the wall.
So then I find myself leaving messages to my own Ukrainian group saying I am so sorry, I cannot help you, yes it is madness, yes I double checked, no I don’t know what to do now. The press can write about it, like they shamed Lower Austria this week for not lifting the limit on how much Ukrainians in Grundversorgung can earn in paid work. But it doesn’t change anything. The head of AMS (national job service) also criticised these rules (while asking for more money for his agency to get Ukrainians into jobs — oh the irony!), explaining how important it is that Ukrainians be helped in getting into paid work, and still nothing happens. They wave Ukrainian flags and talk about helping but in practice the messages are clear: if you don’t have the means to support yourself independently, maybe you should go home. Or do you know how to survive in Europe on a couple hundred of Euros per month at today’s prices?
The next story from Vienna was even worse. A mother of one child reached out to me, desperate for advice. My jaw dropped as I read her message:
This mother was legally employed earning less than €1000 per month. She lived in a refugee “hotel” for six months in Vienna. During that time she did not hide her job and was told by staff on site she could live for free, and the only benefit she would have to give up were the monthly payments of €40 each to her and her child which hotel residents receive as “pocket money” (the hotel offers 3 “meals” per day therefore this is the only money residents receive from the state). Of course, the law on Grundversorgung and Zuverdienstgrenze (these untranslatable German words ahhhhhhhh) says that one does not live for free but rather should be charged some rent after a certain amount of earnings over a threshold, but it is nowhere published transparently in a single source and in each individual case it is implemented differently by the social worker doing the calculation.
This case is particularly special, in that only now, in September, was this mom told she must pay back €1900 (!!) to the Vienna social fund, supposedly for rent for when she lived in the hotel. She moved into her own apartment she rented in June. Can you imagine? You earn less than €1000 per month and then you are hit with a bill equal to more than two months of your wages months after you move out of what you thought was free housing?
So what happens. I ask a contact I have (same kind bureaucrat willing to help look into individual cases). Let’s also remember that I am a totally unpaid volunteer doing this shit nearly 24/7 for the past year and a half and some days, like yesterday, I couldn't even bring myself to write this Substack because I was so mad and frustrated and felt like I am the real idiot for even getting involved in what is a cesspool of unsolvable clusterfucks. But I digress. My contact reaches out to the NGO that issues payments (and bills!) in Vienna, and they confirm that yes there is this calculation, and the official letter has not yet been sent out, but she will receive it, and if she wants to contest it, here is the address of the Ombudsman of the Vienna social fund. Which is like asking the IRS to audit the IRS. You get the idea. So yes, they do plan on charging her €1900. How she should pay and not end up homeless or starving in the process is anyone’s guess.
So then I have to tell this poor woman that yes it seems it is all really true and it seems they can really hand you a huge bill months later and I AM SO SORRY. And you feel like shit and I cannot even imagine what she feels like. Then, of course, Ukrainians will ask themselves why they even bothered going to work in the first place only to be punished. Can you imagine the state (in this case city of Vienna) employs people inside these “social funds” for the purpose of calculating how much money to take away from already very poor people who earned it on their own? And they call this socialism. Aha.
There are other hiccups, which are not life-threatening, but annoying nonetheless. For example, German classes. There is an entire government office, ÖIF, dedicated to providing newcomers to Austria with German classes, but it is a fight to get a class, to get the class you need paid for, to be able to move onto the next level. This week I spoke with a woman who was two points short on her written exam and now has to take A2 German all over again. Others told me they wanted to register for the next level, say for B1 after A2, but if you have more than 6 months in between courses it doesn’t count, your A2 is no longer valid, you have to re-test, and only then can you move to the next level. I was also told many of the German language instructors are not native speakers themselves, and about a divide within the classrooms between Ukrainians desperate to learn fast so they can find good jobs, and those from other countries who have already received positive asylum decisions in Austria and are in no rush to do anything as they are receiving plentiful social benefits for their entire families (five and seven kids respectively these two men had between them) which Ukrainians do not and will not qualify for.
Healthcare is one of the few areas where everything generally functions, and without question Austria is providing a huge service to many Ukrainians with serious illness, as well as treating war victims (only civilian; Austria does not treat soldiers). However even little things are a battle. State health insurance is provided by e-cards which are little green plastic cards with your photo and number on them and you use this card every time you see a state insurance doctor or collect a prescription in the pharmacy. Except, Ukrainians who do not have jobs do not get these cards. They receive only a piece of paper with a health insurance number, which means they also cannot receive electronic prescriptions on their plastic cards, because they have no plastic cards. So they spend more time than the rest of us running back and forth to the doctors’ offices to pick up paper prescriptions. And some doctors say you should pick up a new piece of paper every quarter.
One women explains, “If you have a paper e-card, you cannot receive an electronic prescription. We went to the doctor and were given a prescription. In the pharmacy, they said they do not have that medicine but they have an analogue. The pharmacist calls the doctor, to ask for a new prescription, which can be done electronically. But then we have to go back to the doctor again to pick up a new paper prescription because we cannot receive an electronic prescription, and of course we do this because the kid is sick…”. A cancer patient wrote me, “I am going through chemotherapy now, and every time the next day after chemo, I have to go personally to my family doctor (and no one cares if I can walk on my legs or get out of bed that day) and take PAPER prescriptions for the medicines I need and PAPER transfer orders for the lab tests I need to do before my next round of chemo.”
This is just one of many examples of how life in Europe under “temporary protection” is not the same as life in Europe for European citizens. It is really dishonest to portray what as being offered as full access to everything because it is not. Europe is undergoing very difficult conversations here about how to deal with what some call “illegal” immigration more broadly and how to attract targeted immigration of professionals for industries in need of people. I understand these are hugely complex conversations for which there are no easy answers, and you would have to be a complete fool not to see how Europe’s generous social programs are abused by some groups once they receive the right to remain here.
My point in writing all this is to show that Ukrainians in Europe, at least the way Austria has implemented it so far, are not on par with other immigrants, as Ukrainians in need are permanently stuck in this system of Grundversorgung which does not provide enough funds to survive at today’s prices, they have no path (for now) of moving into a different category, unless they can rent apartments with their own money and immediately find good jobs. So even though yes, they have full access to the labor market, these examples show that as soon as you get a job you are at risk of losing your social housing and so it becomes a cycle of poverty that it is extremely difficult to break out of. Many landlords want three months deposit to rent an apartment plus three months of payslips. These are impossible asks for families trying to save every Euro. So yes, those who can work will eventually find jobs and become more independent, but many cannot work: elderly, chronically ill, moms of very young children.
We are talking about a huge group of well educated women and kids, such a missed opportunity, and yet in reading recent press interviews given by Austria’s federal minister for women and integration, I haven’t seen the word Ukraine mentioned once. It is just ignored. Swept under the table.
Hope they will all go home once it gets too uncomfortable?
Seems like such a loss for both Austria and Ukraine. Yes, many Ukrainians will eventually go home, to rebuild their country when the war is over, but many do not feel it is safe to go home yet. While they are here in Austria, why not make it easier for them to make a contribution to the economy here? Why punish them as soon as they get paid jobs? This only drives more and more people to work illegally, for cash in hand, and I hear stories like this all day long, unfortunately. The rules here create an entire underground economy, the workings of which the Ukrainians have long figured out, out of necessity.
The thing is, on a human, emotional level, if everything is a battle: school, housing, work, healthcare, language classes at some point, you just accept defeat.
I was also contacted this week by two moms with two kids each in a small town in Lower Austria who were told suddenly their social housing will no longer be available and they should find somewhere else to live. That’s it. No help with another option, just a deadline and good luck. And then they call me, and ask me to help find them a new apartment. And then I have to be the asshole and explain I cannot help them find a new apartment, and instead try to give advice on which resources exist. And they beg me because they think I have some magic advantage, little do they know I myself have never ever rented an apartment in Austria and I am as clueless as they are.
And then there are the avoidable situations which are still frustrating, like a dad who send me yesterday a photo of a €1200 fine he was issued because he parked his car with Ukrainian license plates near the “hotel” where he lives with his son in Vienna, and never drove it, and paid the annual resident street parking, but because the car was technically on the roads in 2023, he was fined for not having valid car insurance. He then sent me a photo of insurance purchased yesterday effective today, and I thought, oh no, he is fucked. And I have to explain why parking on the street it not the same as having a car in a private driveway with plates off.
For me personally, I loathe being that person who gives another email address or phone number instead of helping directly. But in the vast majority of such cases, I cannot help. I began helping at the train station when the war started, aiding those in need with immediate problems. That is what I can do and I understand how to do. My personality can handle crisis management. Then, we began with the supermarket gift cards, which has been amazing, and we have delivered hundreds of thousands of Euros of direct food aid. But as the months wear on, those €50 bandaids feel so tiny in the face of huge, structural issues I cannot fix as an individual. And I am literally the last person on earth who should be advising on how to navigate bureaucracy because I am terrible at it, get full on panic attacks — I think it is from a life of moving from country to country, some kind of permanent immigrant trauma we carry with us, always feeling everywhere like only half a person, never fully belonging anywhere. I suppose that is also why I have so much sympathy for these Ukrainian women and their kids, because I am in awe every day of how much they do manage to accomplish despite all the roadblocks and hurdles and odds against them. They are the literal embodiment of perseverance in the face of adversity.
So I keep reminding myself about the little victories, each family we collectively helped buy groceries this week. THANK YOU! And huge thank you to Mario who is sending out another big batch of Hofer cards today from Graz to those who have been waiting patiently on our Cards for Ukraine waiting list.