Welcome to Austria! Now go home.
A snapshot of what it feels like to be hearing all this pain these days. An update on our grocery card distribution program (TLDR: we would love to continue helping but we need donations to do so).
I stopped by Wien HBF today, Sunday, on my way home. Took a photo of this sign that says welcome in Ukrainian. Although now, to be fair, the mood is more like good luck you are on your own. In the time since I was volunteering at the train station, a lot has changed. The charity on site is still handing out snacks, drinks, and some personal hygiene products, but today is reportedly their last day with this distribution point in the station. The cafeteria that did serve warm food a short walk from the station is since closed. Something else opened up in its place but a longer walk away; I don’t know about it and didn’t see any visible signage about it at the station today. There is also an information point run by the charity, but the staffing hours will be reduced from tomorrow to 4pm - midnight, and reportedly it will disappear altogether from September 17.
Rumor is the train station (managed by Austria’s national railway monopoly) thinks it can handle things from here. I am still hearing of elderly and handicapped arriving by train, albeit not in the numbers we saw in spring. I did see QR code signage put up by the railway, and heard Russian-speaking security handling a line of Ukrainians waiting to ask for railway tickets. My concern is the social worker aspect of the train station. What happens when an elderly person arrives with no money and no phone and needs help. I shudder to think. How hard could it be to keep a staff of one or two? You don’t have to hand out food and drinks. You could hand out gift cards. There are a million and one cafes in the station. Maybe the railway has already thought of this. Maybe. Maybe not. Time will tell. Feels super strange in the context of having written just two days ago: unfortunately, one thing I have experienced firsthand this past six months: just when you think it cannot get worse, it does.
This weekend has been filled with school discussions, desperate searches for housing, requests for help to find employment, and cries for help. There has also been happy news. A baby girl was born in Vienna yesterday who survived Mariupol in her mother’s womb.
Many Ukrainian mothers of school-aged children will not be sending their kids off to school tomorrow as Austria’s schools reopen in the eastern half of the country. They have not been assigned school places yet. The older the child, the harder it is to find a place. And over 15? Forget it. Austrian law requires 9 years of schooling. After that, you are on your own, swimming freely as we say in Russian, and Ukrainians are no exception. Would have been great to have created a program in major cities so that Ukrainian teens 16+ could have finished their own high school curriculum in Austria. Much talk, for a variety of reasons (funding, bureaucracy), it never materialised. Many children will continue to attend Ukrainian online schools, provided the Austrian education ministry lets them. This is also not clear for the younger kids — legally they are reportedly worried about precedent of waiving in-person attendance — yet ironically they haven’t found places for everyone so I can imagine enforcement will be lax out of necessity.
This crisis has highlighted so much of what is broken and un-reformed within Austria’s own institutions and political system. The constant childish stuck record game of blame and shame between federal and state, socialist and conservative. Ultimately everyone deflects responsibility and no progress is made, or so it often feels, especially when it comes to education.
An enthusiastic volunteer who speaks native German wrote me excited after having learned how amazing and innovative Ukraine’s school system is.
I sighed, having three kids in gymnasium myself (one considered to be one of the best in the country, for which we pay a hefty fee each month), I am fully aware of the invisible brick walls kids run into in practice here. The lack of motivation to learn. The rigid nature of cramming for endless exams, the lack of creativity in the system and in teaching methods (chicken and egg question, surely). But I digress.
Diapers. The moms are all talking about diapers. Six months in and many still cannot afford the basics they need to care for their young ones. A center staffed by volunteers in Vienna which provides such baby items was closed for August and will re-open this week. I already texted the manager to warn her to expect a storm of desperate customers on Tuesday morning. She writes me back: we know, we are working on it.
You know who likely isn’t working on a Sunday? Those getting paid to fix all of this.
This morning I stopped by a dorm in the 11th district which I have written about many, many times. It is essentially “no man’s land” because the city of Vienna says it is an emergency shelter, and as such, does not want to let Ukrainians register at this address (although in spring, many did). So you have a big building housing 100+ refugees for months, feeding them three times a day (questionable quality and quantity but that is no longer the biggest issue), but not letting them set down any roots you need to build a life here. If one cannot get a Meldezettel (a registration paper with your home address which everyone living in Austria has, even kids), one cannot get a blue card (ID for Ukrainians with temporary protection), nor a health insurance number, nor open a bank account, nor receive state payments. In this case, residents don’t even receive the €40 per month pocket money others are eligible for when they live in dorms or hostels where they are “fed”.
It is a closed, vicious circle. Dead end followed by dead end.
A woman in her 70s from Kyiv met me today. I gave her a €50 grocery card. She came out pushing a walker, and had written with me over Telegram, in the most polite tone. She speaks English. She is well educated. She had cancer. Her bones are weak. She was on her way to Italy on a program for cancer patients when she fell ill and was taken off the train in Vienna. That was four months ago. For two months, she lived in a hotel for refugees, until it was suddenly closed “for repairs” and she was moved into this dorm. She hasn’t been offered anywhere else to live, and every state representative or NGO she speaks with (she seems to have asked them all), tells her they don’t have any housing and “keep looking for something yourself.” She only has a health insurance card because once her blood pressure got so high that they called an ambulance (the dorm has charity staff on site in a supervisory role — you can imagine the Ukrainians have many choice words about their attitudes’ too), and she was given an insurance number as the ambulance whisked her to hospital. She needs doctors appointments no one helps her to make.
She then, to my utter surprise, reaches into her mouth and pulls out her top dentures, showing me they need to be re-glued. I nod, silently, stunned, not quite knowing what to say. I know it’s all a dead end and I feel powerless to help other than offer grocery money. I wish she could show her waving her dentures in her seventy-something hands, hands which have seen so much, and demand action from those in power to do something about this terrible, never-ending limbo.
She gifts me this Easter-themed tea towel. She brought it with her when she left Ukraine. That’s how long she has been “stuck” for.
Next out comes a young mom in her twenties whom I met in summer. She received her supermarket gift card months ago. Today, I am only offering my ear to listen. She arrived at this dorm with her husband and toddler son who has a form of cerebral palsy in early June. Since then, she has been searching desperately for housing in Vienna with no luck. A volunteer helped them to see a paediatrician, who recommended a program in Vienna which provides therapy for such kids. However, the family would need registration in Vienna to qualify. And they live in no man’s land.
The mom pulls out her phone and shows me the dozens of emails she has written to every imaginable NGO in Austria and even to Austria’s Parliament! I snap a photo with my phone of one of her emails, written in perfect German, which didn’t result in any progress. I do not publish it here now because it names the dorm address and the organisation on duty and I have been in Austria long enough to be wary of such things. It is also for this reason I am choosing not to publish the photo I took of the dorm this morning (which btw does not look like it needs to be closed for renovations; it looks like a million other Soviet brutalist blocks east of Berlin).
However, this young mom is more than willing to talk to journalists or anyone who will listen about what they have gone through. They have tried all angles. She cried to a social worker in Vienna’s ACV that she can only feed her son bread at this place. It didn’t change anything. This young mom is petite and thin, but she is a fighter. She is from Zaporozhye. She says the fighting is 30 kilometres from the city; they cannot go back now. She knows which treatment her son needs, and she knows it is only in Vienna. The doctor explained it all to her.
I come home to this.
A cosmetician in Vienna asks me about starting her own company. I have to tell her the truth about how prohibitively expensive that is in Austria.
A mom of 9 and 12 year old kids working full time as a hotel room cleaner on a lake in Austria writes me desperate for a new job for the winter season, as she cannot afford her rent on the lake when the season ends. I send her the names of a few ski hotels, but she is worried there won’t be school for the older child in the town. She has A1 German. She explains she hasn’t had time to go to more language classes; she has been working 40 hours per week.
I hope my covid test comes back so I can go to the hospital tomorrow to translate for genetic testing for the 36 year old mom of three with stage four cancer. I promised to accompany her.
I come home to more endless messages asking (ever so kindly 99% of the time) for €50 supermarket gift cards. 44 empty, pre-addressed envelopes and counting. I can’t fill them if I don’t raise money, and I don’t know how to raise money if I don’t write, so I try to do a little bit of everything and feel totally exhausted. If you would like to help me service my little pile, please donate here or contact me to pass on / post me physical gift cards. To contribute to our website’s very long waiting list, please donate here.
Sometimes the photos warm your heart so much. A very generous individual who I am pretty sure does not want to be named sent this mom of three and a half month old David (born in Austria in May) some money. She wrote back, completely stunned, ever so grateful and shared photos and videos of her eldest son, who is 16, and is on Ukraine’s national ski team, now training in Austria, but state without funding, because war. She wrote how children are a blessing even in the darkest of times. These Ukrainian women, I tell you, they inspire me so much. They are stronger than a thousand tanks put together.
When the poorest and most vulnerable Ukrainians go home, because many who can will, provided their homes are still standing, you won’t see them. The journalists will not arrive at the train stations looking for moving photos of weeping mothers carrying small children. They will leave silently, disillusioned with “Europe”. They say that a lot. We thought it was “Europe”.
This housing crisis is the tip on a big iceberg. The rest is filled with barriers to work, not enough state support to survive financially, schooling and childcare challenges, to put it delicately, and just the day in day out bureaucratic grind of trying to adjust to life in a new country with new circumstances when it feels like doors, both visible and invisible, are constantly being slammed ever so politely in your face. This is what it feels like for Ukrainians who arrived most recently, who more often than not are from occupied territories and active war zones. They arrived empty-handed.
I was thinking today how we welcomed with supermarket gift cards and we now be saying goodbye with them too. We cannot change a country, but we can make a meaningful and memorable difference, one step, one family, on envelope, one card at a time.
Thank you.