Viktoria, Inna, Vladimir & Vyacheslav
Plus Ukraine's incredible recent success on the battlefields. Caution though: Kremlin will not be ready to accept defeat anytime soon. They pounded Kharkiv city yesterday.
My Friday began with an early morning appointment at Vienna’s largest hospital with Viktoria, a single mom of three (boy 14, girl 7 and boy 5) who fled occupied Kherson in a shestyorka (old Lada) they bought for $400 and filled with three adults and four kids to drive to safety. The wartime people-movers would have charged $1000 to get the group to Ukraine. So Viktoria and her sister and her boyfriend bought an old car instead. Boyfriend was allowed out of the country only because Viktoria has stage IV breast cancer. It is in her bones. That much she knows. Her mom died of the disease at 40 when Viktoria was 17.
Viktoria is incredibly upbeat despite the circumstances. Circumstances which would make any other of us mortals just cry in despair. She is living in a dorm on the edge of Vienna which in winter serves as a shelter for homeless. Recently, all the residents of the dorm were instructed to get scanned for tuberculosis. Even the five year old. Viktoria showed me this little passport she received. I kind of sat there in shock with my mouth open in the hospital waiting zone as she told me what she had been up to. The day before she had been passed a coupon from another woman in my Telegram group to collect groceries from Leo, a service offered by Caritas, but one that has been so overrun that it doesn’t accept new applicants for months. Viktoria took one kid with her and crossed town to get a few bags of groceries at a discount price, which she was really grateful for, but it was hard to carry them all home. Her boyfriend didn’t help. I rolled my eyes. There is free bread in the dorm. Viktoria wakes up at 6am to get some before it runs out.
I cannot disclose any medical details but I will just say in broad strokes that while care is for sure being provided along lines dictated, the way in which messages are delivered and the tone of course differs by the individual delivering the message. It took at some moments a lot of my own composure not to translate everything and not to get angry. The hospital gives the cancer patient a lot of instructions and the cancer patient must then go back across town to their GP to get pieces of paper enabling them to get a blood test in a lab and an ultrasound. The hospital cannot give that paper itself, even though it is the one ordering the tests. No, one must go to the GP and sit in another waiting room. Just normal Austrian things, I like to say, only this time I wasn’t laughing. For every appointment, Viktoria must come with a translator, we were warned. Which means next week I will have to come too for at least the beginning of the early morning chemo appointment. And we both have to have a covid test to enter the building. You line up, show covid test QR code and ID, then are handed a little yellow piece of paper, which five meters later, I kid you not, you hand back to someone else, standing there for no reason other than someone wanted to create jobs for people to do nothing. It is mind-boggling.
We leave the hospital and I always offer Viktoria Starbucks on the way out. A hot sandwich and a coffee. We chat about our mutual love of coffee. About the KAVA stands on every corner in Kyiv. About how great it is in Ukraine during peacetime.
I ask about the kids. They don’t have blue cards yet because no one told Viktoria she needs to get the kids photographed too, and the photographer is only open on Mondays. There is a kindergarten spot for her youngest and a second grade spot for her daughter, but they cannot actually start going until the blue cards arrive, and no one knows how long that will take. The elementary school will be a group class of only Ukrainian kids of different ages, but for now all the kids were sent home, because they haven’t found a teacher yet. Her youngest is begging to go to kindergarten, he is going crazy without this kind of structure and lack of even a scooter to zip around in. Her eldest is 14 and is doing online school in Ukraine. He does not yet have a school assignment in Vienna.
Online school in Ukraine is run by their teachers in Kherson. Viktoria showed me the chats in Telegram and Viber and there are videos and lessons and it can all be accessed with a mobile phone. 80% of Viktoria’s friends stayed behind in Kherson. But school is online. There are rubles and hryvnia. Mobile network is only Russian. She talks wistfully of the before times, even though she was on welfare, they lived pretty well. Her kids could eat for free lunch at school. Kindergarten was open until 7pm. There were local sanitariums run by the state you could send the kids to for a “health” holiday. All the good things left over from the social state of Soviet times, adapted and preserved by a Modern Ukraine.
In the afternoon I get a text message. Viktoria has already been to the GP and gotten her marching orders for the blood test and ultrasound. She is doing her homework. I applaud her with a thumbs up emoji and promise to be there next week for her first chemo session in Austria.
Inna calls me a few days ago. I really do not like phone calls because they usually catch me off guard in the middle of something. In this case I was driving and it was another one of many many Ukrainian or Austrian numbers that I answer not knowing who will be on the other end of the phone. When I heard “two kids 12 and 14” and her address, my heart sunk. I promised to get Inna a Hofer card as soon as I could, and asked her to tell me in a little bit more detail her story, how she ended up in what I refer to as no man’s land, that dorm in Vienna’s 11th district, which although was always meant to be temporary, Ukrainians live in for months, with no registration, no blue card, no insurance, no school, no social payments, and no way out.
Inna has a 14 year old son and a 12 year old daughter. She arrived a month ago. She writes me this the next day:
They sent us to (dorm name) from Stadion (Train of Hope welcome center in Vienna). The next day, they offered us to go to Linz. I agreed. They told us there is no housing in Vienna, and said it would be easier to find housing in a smaller city. So many people agreed. In the end, the route was changed from Linz to Salzburg, and after that they said Wiener Neustadt and Graz. Then they said there isn't any room and no one is accepting new Ukrainians anywhere, so we stayed here. And it's been three weeks. After that, we registered with the police. We don't receive any social payments, nor German courses, you cannot get a job or go to school because you don't have a Meldezettel (mandatory registration document in Austria at your address of residence). That's our story in two words. Good morning. Thank you.
I will meet Inna and some of her neighbours tomorrow. I received enough money to buy them €50 grocery cards they can use in the shop across the street. There are rumblings this morning in my chat that some residents of this dorm are now being transferred to another dorm in Vienna, also “no man’s land”, this one run by the federal agency in Austria (BBU) responsible for refugees, but no the responsibility of the city of Vienna. Uncertainty leads to panic and you can imagine how people who feel totally ignored and forgotten for months by a horribly broken and cruel system will react to such a surprise. I hope the folks I need to see tomorrow morning will still be there. This includes blind Andrei, who called me again yesterday, and I promised to come tomorrow, and bring him a phone, which a kind Austrian is bringing me tomorrow morning.
Yesterday afternoon I also delivered a card to Vladimir, who is here with his family from Hostomel’ outside of Kyiv. His teenage son is a stellar football player. They are trying out for the various Austrian clubs. He talked for half an hour non-stop about the trauma of what they all lived through and witnessed. Hostomel, the battle for the airport, the Chechens and the Russians. Bucha. Irpin. Borodyanka. He talks with friends who have worked on the clean-up, who have had to drive equipment to bury bodies found in mass graves. How you can never be the same again after you have seen all that. He talks and talks and I just stand there and listen because I understand it is like a form therapy. How their own relatives in safer parts of Ukraine didn’t let them stay. So they came to Austria. They do not complain. Only a little bit about the bureaucrats at AMS. I assure him they are unfriendly to everyone. It’s nothing personal. It is what it is.
Just when I think Friday evening has finally arrived, I receive a message from a woman from Mariupol, who was one of the first former residents of that city to ask me for a Hofer card back in the spring. Her husband, Vyacheslav, has written a book, she writes. An entire book. 200 pages. About what they lived through during those 52 days in Mariupol. Do I know a translator? How can they get it published in German and English? She sends me the prologue. I offer to publish it here.
The Diary of Saying Goodbye is the story of saying goodbye to Mariupol. To friends and relatives. To our homes, built with years of hard work, to our familiar way of life. The Diary of Saying Goodbye is the story of ordinary Mariupol residents, who under conditions of war, had their own daily victories -- saving themselves and helping others to survive as well. The diary allows the reader to see the events of the hell of war from the inside, where Life and Death are not abstract ideas, but simply a matter of luck. It is a look at the events through a real history, in which each word is true: the first bombs, life without water, heat, electricity, evacuation of families, burying a friend who died, wounds, leaving the burned-out city. Strong and weak people, vicious and kind people, bombs and the falling of human souls, all of this takes place on the pages of The Diary of Saying Goodbye, over the very short and unending long 52 days of saying goodbye.
I explained to Natalia that in the English language publishing world, one needs an agent and then a publisher and this can take years…or you can self-publish at a reasonable price but then won’t have the benefits of promotion by an established publisher. There is a woman in Vienna who has agreed to work on the German translation. I told Natalia I would be happy to work on the English one, but you still need an editor, and a publisher, and 200 pages is a lot to work on without compensation. Perhaps I can make time to have coffee with them next week. I have the entire book. They sent me the PDF. It is already nicely formatted into chapters with photos and everything. How does one live through this hell and write an entire book so quickly? I am in awe. I want to read it and learn more.
Please do let me know if you have any contacts or suggestions for Vyacheslav.
Very briefly, I am sure you have seen the incredible military success which Ukraine is experiencing on the Kharkiv front. While I do not doubt any of it, I am still quite confident the Kremlin is not ready to come to any negotiating table nor to accept the new reality of failure and embarrassment on the ground, on the front lines. Kharkiv the city, in Ukraine control, was hammered yesterday by Russia. My TikTok feed is full of scared residents who said the sirens were running non-stop and the city was being attacked all over. This, one assumes, is what happens from Russia in retaliation, as their boys flee east. Russia has been wrong from the start. But this hasn’t visibly weakened Putin’s position internally. At least not yet.
This is an excellent read on the military situation: Gradually, then Suddenly. As Ukraine is intentionally silent about the situation on the ground, much of what we know is coming from Russian pro-war bloggers (terrible name but that’s what people are calling them).
I keep thinking about this. About the immeasurable human price Ukraine is paying with its young men and women to fight back. These very moving paintings were painted by 16 year old Christina Danko.
And if you haven’t watched this yet, as some have noted, Hollywood has nothing on Ukraine’s ability to stage powerful scenes which move you to tears and use the power of social media to spread these messages of hope, which hopefully translated into the military and humanitarian aid so desperately needed.
I am thinking about that too. Yesterday I sourced laptops, school supplies, spent hours connecting Ukrainians to private donors in Austria and beyond. It is time consuming but ultimately the only way I know now to combat I real time the collosal collective failures of the official response here in Austria. The never-ending run around. The inability to work and provide for yourself while asking for minimal state financial support and a roof over your family’s head. The lack of housing. The lack of school spots. The lack of school supplies! One kind man in Tirol wanted to send a Ukrainian mom in Vienna some money yesterday for school supplies, and in the end the only way to actually do it, because she has not been able to open a bank account, because no Meldezettel, because that dorm, is for him to buy gift cards, send them to me in the post, and I meet her and give them to her. How crazy is that?
I am sending lists of baby gifts. I am connecting to students who need computers. I am trying to still send out Hofer cards. I get in €100, I buy two more cards. I am really really thinking about targeting wealthy Ukrainians living in Austria, as prompted by this encounter with an underaged boy driving his dad’s fancy car yesterday:
This is far too long so I will stop here. Thank you for reading. Wishing you all a good weekend. Going to try and take one now too, at least until tomorrow morning (inshallah).