Tatiana & Sofia
The fourth in a series of twelve days of Christmas. Personal stories by Ukrainians now in Austria. In their own words.
Tatiana meets me in a crowded downtown Starbucks on a busy Saturday afternoon. We take a seat upstairs, squeezing ourselves on a communal table amongst students cramming for university exams. Tatiana is petite with long, dark hair, blue eyes, a pale face, and gives off an air of positivity and she begins to tell me her story. Tatiana (38) is from Dnipro. She and her daughter Sofia (11) arrived in Austria in March. “It was really scary,” Tatiana recalls. Tatiana worked as a manager in a construction company in Dnipro and she loved her job. When the war broke out, all work stopped.
She had several meetings planned for that Thursday, and just like that, their lives changed forever. The car alarm went off in her car parked outside of their apartment building. Then all the car alarms of all the cars. Then Tatiana heard a second explosion. There was nothing yet on the news. It was 5am. Tatiana had been so busy with her daily life she hadn’t been reading a lot of the news. They had celebrated their daughter’s birthday in January, and had plans to go to Kharkiv for a long weekend in March. Tatiana’s husband was in Kyiv where he worked for Boeing. She called him and her brother in Kyiv, and urged them to get out however the could. Her brother and his family headed for Lviv, and Tatiana’s husband took a train that same day, February 24, to Dnipro to be with his family.
The first thing Tatiana did that morning was grab her daughter, still in pyjamas, and fill up her car with gas. They waited hours in line. The gas station was only accepting cash payments. People were helping each other, making change, offering to help buy a snack for the kids hungry, waiting their turns. The more they all read the news, the more worried they became. Tatiana’s friend invited them to come stay in her house, which she thought would be safer than Tatiana’s apartment on the fifth floor of a five-story building. Soon there were three families living together. The adults talked about what to do, the kids started even playing games like “war” and soldiers. The sirens would go, they would all hide under the staircase or head to the bomb shelter.
The adults would talk to each other, who was going where. Tatiana and the other mothers decided to leave. They packed their bags, and on March 2 set off by car: three mothers, three children, and one 86 year-old granny. Her husband helped navigate their route from home. It took seven days to reach the Ukrainian border from Dnipro. There were checkpoints along the way. A drive that would normally take three hours now took ten. Curfew began at 5pm; you couldn’t drive at night. They stopped to sleep along the way at spots like summer sports camps. There would be volunteers offering hot tea and soups. Tatiana recalls a couple from Donestk with a two-month old baby. They had just bought a new apartment in Kharkiv one and a half months prior. They were now starting entirely over for the second time in their young lives.
As they drove west through Ukraine, they stopped at villages and slept where they were offered a place to stay. At one stop the granny’s pulse dropped so low they feared she wouldn’t be able to continue. Friends of friends of friends would give tips on where they could sleep for a night. Tatiana recalls the simple ecstasy of being able to take a hot shower and wash her hair in Chernivtsi.
The car of seven was headed to Austria. Tatiana know a Ukrainian family who had been living here, and they had found an apartment which an Austrian family was willing to offer to Ukrainian refugees in Vienna. The granny was travelling with them as her daughter was in Vienna. The three mothers and three children would all share one apartment for six months, which was not easy. Today, four of them still share. Each mother hands over €330 compensation each month from the Austrian state to the landlord, but they have been warned they will need to start paying more for communal services and pay extra for gas every three months now that prices have gone up.
Tatiana turns back to their journey. On the Romania-Hungary border, the Red Cross generously offered them food, blankets, tea, and took them to sleep at a church for the night. The granny looked around, confused in the middle of the night, and asked “did we die?”. At this point the group have been driving for seven days since they left Dnipro. It took them ten hours to cross the Hungarian border the next morning. Tatiana wanted to drive straight through Hungary, to push through to get to Austria, without stopping. After seven days of travel, she was close to her breaking point. She hit 170 kmph and the granny asked “are we perhaps going a bit too fast?”. With 50km left to Vienna, Tatiana felt herself falling asleep at the wheel. She pulled over and collapsed into a deep sleep on the steering wheel just shy of the Hungary-Austria border. When they finally arrived in Vienna later that morning, an Austrian neighbour, an older lady, popped in to see the refugees and immediately chastise them for their car being parked illegally. Such a classic Viennese welcome, I thought to myself.
Tatiana and her friends and the three children arrived in Vienna on March 10. Then began their quest to master all the bureaucratic steps involved in settling into life in Austria. Tatiana refers to these as the “grey weekdays”. The mothers took turns going to ACV and waiting in line in the cold for hours. They didn’t manage to get inside until the third day trying, with a quick phone call to the other mom and kids to hurry up and get in line once they had lost reached the front. They only received their first social payment from Austria in May.
Sofia, Tatiana’s nearly 12 year old daughter, was lucky to be offered a spot at a private new middle school in Vienna. The school offered her free tuition, lunch, and aftercare. There were four Ukrainian children in the class. Two were able to move forward to the next grade in September, Sofia included, and two were asked to repeat the year until their German improves. Sofia knows English very well, having taken private lessons from a very young age. The Ukrainian kids are not “graded” yet. Sofia is also still doing Ukrainian online school, with her old class from Dnipro, at least two to three hours via Zoom every afternoon and evening, with the Ukrainian teachers making themselves available in the evenings to answer questions and support the children now learning online from Europe. “Is it not a lot for Sofia?”, I ask Tatiana. She nods. It is, but it is important not to fall behind. They will go home when the war is over. She wants Sofia not to fall behind her peers. She must be prepared for university.
Tatiana is so positive about her experiences in Austria. I ask her about this. “There are different people everywhere. I have also had someone here tell me to my face: it’s time for you Ukrainians to go home, now the gas is more expensive thanks to you all, you are sitting here on our handouts.”
Tatiana is grateful to the many organizations which have helped her family along the way. For a while she collected discounted groceries each week from Leo, a Caritas program. She has been taking German courses, and will finish A2 this December. She has a new social circle, full of Ukrainians, all helping each other, all from different cities. “Can you imagine, she says, I always spoke Russian, but I now have friends from Ternopil, who only speak Ukrainian, and it’s not an issue, we are friends, we each speak our own languages to each other, we help each other.”
The local district museum in Vienna’s 9th district has been very helpful, offering many programs for Ukrainians, with a Russian director. Tatiana mentions her aunt lives in Chelyabinsk. When the war started, her aunt told Tatiana by phone, “it cannot be true”. Her aunt had clearly drunk the Russian TV Kool-Aid, and Tatiana decided not to have any more contact with her. The Concordia charity has also been very helpful, organising several groups for Ukrainian adults and children, extra German classes, even a summer holiday at a discounted price (€110 for one week) in the Styrian countryside, and they helped fill out all the paperwork.
Tatiana also finally received the child benefit money, but her neighbour did not. They applied at the same time, included all the same supplemental information. Tatiana’s application was approved and the money was deposited on her account. Her neighbour was instructed to submit additional documentation and translations. No rhyme or reason. Just pure luck. That part is frustrating, Tatiana admits.
Tatiana talks a lot about her old job in Dnipro. She loved it. She loved the team she worked with. She misses the excitement. Her husband is back in Dnipro, working remotely to the extent that is possible. She has not seen him since she and Sofia left in March. Tatiana plans to look for work in Austria as soon as she has completed B1 German. She would love to work in a construction company office here, too. An Austrian promised to make an introduction once her language skills are good enough.
Tatiana believes in the power of positive thinking. She invites her Austrian neighbours regularly for tea. So much so that even the grumpy lady who snapped at her on day one about where she parked her car now happily stops by for tea and homemade blini. She even lifted her lawsuit against Tatiana’s landlord. We joked about how every building in Austria has a neighbour who is suing all the others. It’s like a national sport for angry, bored old people with too much disposable income. My jaw drops when I hear Tatiana invites ALL her neighbours over for tea.
“All of them? Really?”
“Yes! Why not? They love it! At first they were skeptical, but now they all ask when they can stop by again!”
I thanked Tatiana for her time and gave her the contact of my older daughter so Sofia might have someone for spoken language practice. Her teachers all say she is doing well but needs to be less afraid to speak German. Tatiana went to the parent-teacher conference day and did all the meetings in German. I tell her how impressed I am. She tells me how important it is to try.
Tatiana left me with a buzz of positive energy. She told me good things happen when you believe they can and will happen. You have to go in thinking positive. I thought back to my Friday meeting, in which my interview partner was more like me, more glass is half empty than half full, and wondered what it must be like to go through life thinking that way. I wish it was that easy to snap and see things in a positive light.
When we were finishing up, I said, gently, you know, many Ukrainians in Vienna didn’t have such a soft landing. I know, she says, and nods solemnly. She knows. She hears. She is grateful for the luck they have had and the support network she has built for her and Sofia here, of both Ukrainians and Austrians.
Lovely. Nice for a success. And for the feeling that if you are positive and have the charm, you can overcome grumpy and curmudgeonly folks. And. Homemade food always softens the edges! 🥰