On December 14th at 9:05 p.m. on ORF 2
Vienna (OTS) – A good 20 years ago, Aurica moved from Moldova (today Moldova) to Austria to earn a lot of money cleaning, ironing and babysitting. Their misery drove them into the arms of smugglers, who took them to the wealthy West for thousands of euros. The young mother only wanted to stay in Austria for two years and quickly use the money she earned to build her house. But in 2004, when she returned to her home village, she had a rude awakening. Aurica, 32, had to realize that her husband Mischa had become a stranger to her and that she didn’t have enough money. When Mischa found out that she was planning to go to Austria again, he took his own life. Because the 33-year-old widow had no other way out, she took out a loan from people smugglers again in 2005 in order to get to the West illegally. She leaves her two children Victor, 15, and Diana, 12, alone in the half-finished house: “We will try to forgive her,” they both say before they leave: “She is doing it for us.” After three more years of living in the shadows in Austria, Aurica returned to Moldova in 2008 and met almost grown-up children. The two are traumatized and have little idea what to do with their mother. The fate of Aurica and her family is typical for tens of thousands of illegal guest workers from Eastern Europe, as the “Am Schauplatz” long-term observation “Illegal between East and West” by Ed Moschitz shows on Thursday, December 14, 2023, at 9:05 p.m. on ORF 2 .
Today, 20 years later, Aurica travels to Austria legally. Like many Moldovans, she became Romanian. But Aurica, 52, wants to go back to the small village in Moldova because her house is finished. But her life in illegality, the hard work and the painful separations have left their mark on her. With her daughter Diana, now 30, and son Victor, 33, she looks back on her many years abroad. Victor lives in Germany; he came for a few weeks to get married in the village. Diana is already the mother of two small children; she works and lives in Vienna. The fact that the Republic of Moldova is well on the way to accession negotiations to the European Union comes too late for Aurica and her family. However, their fate is an example of what it means for many people when political borders strictly separate wealthy and poor regions from one another.