"We are only women now"
Three generations of women from Mykolaiv trying to make it work in Austria. A fourth generation, the eldest, refused to leave Ukraine. She prays every day in church for Ukraine's khloptsi.
Iryna, the grandmother, writes me over Telegram. She would like to share her story, about how hard it is to make it all work for so many Ukrainian families in this new life they are trying to build for themselves in Austria. We meet in a McDonalds in an u-bahn station. Iryna has brought her daughter, Maryna (42), who looks too young to be the mother of a 16 year-old daughter. The ladies have already bought themselves coffees, and I take a seat, embarrassed I didn’t get there earlier so I could have at least been the one to pay.
Maryna was an English teacher in Mykolaiv. She and her 16 year-old daughter Katya left Mykolaiv last spring. Her mother, Iryna, only followed in August. “We have no men,” the women explain. “Maryna is divorced and my husband died in May,” Iryna explains. “We are on our own now.” There is also a great-grandmother, Olga Dmitrievna, 85 years old, who insisted on staying in Mykolaiv no matter what. She goes to church every day and prays for “our khloptsi” (Ukrainian colloquial for our guys). Olga Dmitrievna’s father, Dmitry Ivanovich (born 1895), actually served in the Austro-Hungarian army from 1914-1919, as back then what is now modern day Poland was Ukrainian territory controlled by the Austro-Hungarian empire. In the 1920s, two of his daughters were forced to work as indentured servants in Graz. Maryna shows me all the names and dates she has carefully written in a notebook.
“I came to Vienna once with Katya as a tourist. I looked at the students sitting on benches, thought they look happy, and wondered if maybe one day Katya could attend university here. But fate had other plans.” When mother and daughter returned to Mykolaiv from that holiday, Maryna made sure Katya began taking German lessons. As a teacher of English, Maryna understands perfectly how important foreign languages are for opening doors of opportunity.
Maryna and Katya left Mykolaiv last spring with the help of volunteers. The way out was dangerous; there was fear the Russians would blow up the only bridge that connected the city on a peninsula with the road to Odesa. From Odesa, they travelled by train to Košice and Vienna. The train was so crowded you could not sit, you could not pee — people had taken to urinating into plastic bottles. Everyone was fighting for a space; Maryna recalls people pulling each other by the hair to get up stairs. Iryna came later, in August. Her husband died in May, and the shelling grew worse over the summer. One night she realised she simply cannot sleep anymore in her apartment. It was too scary.
When Maryna and Katya first arrived, they were taken in by an Austrian family, but after ten days, that host had a change of heart. They found another family. It was all a matter of luck. Granny had once gone to a sanatorium in Kyiv oblast, where she met another granny, whose daughter lived in Vienna…and she put them in touch with volunteers who helped them find an Austrian host family. Maryna and Katya share a small basement of a family home in a green district of Vienna outside of the city centre. The family have been very generous hosts for almost a year now, they receive only the rent which the state provides in such cases (€330 per family per month), but have told mother and daughter they will need to move to other housing in March. The Austrians need their basement for their grandchild who will be coming to Vienna to study. Everything is calm and peaceful, but a deadline is a deadline, and mother and daughter have no idea how to rent something on their own right now, as Maryna must go to work, and you cannot work full-time while living in state-provided housing, and to rent something privately, you need a three-month deposit.
When Iryna came in August, she begged for social housing in Wien, and was assigned a shared room with two other ladies (strangers) in a Caritas-run dorm in Vienna, but in the same neighbourhood as her daughter and granddaughter.
Maryna looks at me “I have to work. I am the only one who can work. My daughter is in school and mother is 63.” Iryna interjects “I would like to work, I could clean, but when they hear my age the conversation ends.”
Katya is focused on school. With the help of their first local landlord, Katya was accepted to a very good bilingual German-English gymnasium in Vienna, and she is being graded, not separated like the other Ukrainian kids. She has a long commute, over an hour every day on public transport, as the school is in a totally different end of the city. Katya wakes up at 5am every morning. Maryna explains her own English probably helped the school director take a chance on Katya, that an of course the introduction from an Austrian.
Last week, Katya made a power point slideshow in Ethics about her own journey with her mother as a refugee. There wasn’t a dry eye in the classroom. Even the kid who is almost always asleep woke up to listen. (You can view Katya’s slideshow here). Katya drags her old laptop every day to school and back. Her back hurts. Maryna would like to buy her a light iPad or similar, but for that she needs the child benefit funds to arrive. They applied in October and have not received any money yet.
Maryna has been busy studying German as she wants to work as soon as possible. She has completed A2, and is taking B1. She just completed a course offered by Caritas called “Step2Job” as training to be a hotel receptionist. It was a small group, just eight students, and was quite intense. The ladies all received a diploma, but they will have to look for jobs on their own.
The mathematics are impossible, though. Maryna explains: an entry-level receptionist job in a hotel may pay about €1500 per month gross, so €1200 net. An apartment for three in Vienna may cost €700-800 per month. So if only Maryna can work, they would have to try all three of them to cover all their other expenses for €500 per month (frankly, impossible) plus any private apartment rental contract is going to expect a deposit of three months, money Maryna does not have. And she doesn’t have the ability to stay rent-free for a few more months, because the Austrian host family need their space back. If Maryna and Katya ask for a dorm room, she will not be able to work legally full time, as that is banned in “Grundversorgung”, and Maryna really wants to work. She has no apartment to go home too. She wants Katya to graduate from school here, pass Matura, and enrol in university.
Iryna is clearly upset by not being able to earn money to contribute to the family budget. She receives €260 per month from the Austrian government, of which €33 goes towards a monthly public transport pass (no discount at her age of 63), €10 towards her mobile phone, etc etc. She grabs her hair and shows me: “I haven’t had a haircut. We do our own nails. I was an engineer. I used to holiday in Egypt and Turkey. But the money we brought with us, it’s nearly gone.”
Maryna receives €150 per month for Katya, but a 16 year old eats like an adult. One school trip to a museum costs €10. The class took a trip to Dublin, Ireland. It cost the other students €1000 each, but the school and the parents’ association helped the family, and “only” charged them €250 for Katya to take part. Plus she had to give Katya pocket money. There will be a trip to Rome in September. Maryna is already worried about how to pay for it.
Maryna pulls out her notebook and shows me her receipts. She only goes to Penny after 5pm, when some items are discounted. I had no idea, I explain. SOMA is a social market one can shop at if you can prove you are on limited income, but many of the products are past-date. It is really hard to make these choices on a daily basis when you are three adult women trying to survive on €260 + €260 + €150 per month for all of your expenses. Maryna really wants to work too, but she does not know how to make the mathematics of housing work, and by March. She is confident she will find a good job as a hotel receptionist and will prove herself to be a hard worker and quickly get promoted. But how to get into affordable housing which does not prevent you from getting a job? And once you get that job, how to feed three adults on one income with no access to any other social benefits?
The Grundversorgung system is the wrong system for Ukrainians. It was designed by the Austrian authorities for failure (this is my opinion, of course) and as a deterrent to prevent migration from non-EU countries. It does not provide enough funds to survive at today’s prices. They in the government know all this and yet do not fix it. When the EU granted all Ukrainians temporary protection, they should never have been put in this system. Austria should have done as Germany did (Hartz IV), and offer Ukrainians the same basic social payments as those whose asylum-cases were approved or unemployed Austrians. In Germany, Ukrainian refugees receive nearly double the funds they receive in Austria. And basic goods and housing prices are more or less the same.
Plus, those receiving financial assistance from the Austrian state, including free or subsidised housing, are banned from working. So it becomes a vicious circle one cannot break out of. At the moment, a refugee receiving Grundversorgung may legally earn €110 per month (so, nothing basically) plus €80 for each minor child (still nothing). The authorities want to pass a new law at the end of February increasing this amount by some arcane equation that no one can figure out, but still nothing near a living wage. Hence, the conundrum. Even if you find a good full-time job, you cannot afford a deposit on an apartment. Rather than helping Ukrainians with deposits, there is talk of perhaps paying Austrians more money for taking in Ukrainians. Which is a good idea, I suppose, but nearly a year since the war broke out, many local hosts are tired, and an extra couple of hundred Euros isn’t really going to change their minds. Those hosting are not doing so for the money, in most cases.
I look at Iryna — very young for her age, eager to work, eager to be useful, going a bit crazy from not being able to be more “useful”, Maryna — managing the family budget, learning German quickly, eager to get a good full-time job with room for professional growth, and Katya — clearly a very smart and mature young woman working very hard to succeed in her new academically challenging school, and I think THESE WOMEN DESERVE BETTER. They deserve a helping hand. They deserve a clear way out of this path of forced poverty Ukrainian refugees in Austria are being corralled into. They are exactly the kind of hard-working, educated, eager to work immigrants a country should welcome with open arms.
I ask about Olga Dmitrievna. She has enough to eat. She spent the summer in the countryside with her brother. Volunteers in Mykolaiv bring her food, and the church helps too. She told her women “I ran from war once, I will not do it again.” She keeps praying for the Ukrainian boys. She will not leave her home.
I feel utterly useless that I am not able to give Maryna any useful or life-changing advice because I too do not understand the mathematics. I know the Austrian response is unfair. It prevents people from helping themselves. It goes against all economic logic, too (why would you not want to increase the number of taxpayers?).
I thank the women for their time, and promise to share their story. Maryna understands there are many families just like them. Only women. No husband or son sending financial aid from his salary in Ukraine. On their own. In this new life. The future is more than uncertain.