The Mission of Maria Loley - by Susan Poizner
Telegraph Magazine, May 20, 1995

She works from a tiny desk in the hallway of her home without so much as a fax machine. Yet this 70-year-old woman has make the Austrian town of Poysdorf into a haven for refugees from the former Yugoslavia and regimes further afield. Report by Susan Poizner. Photographs by Wolfgang Bellwinkel.

Every Sunday morning, Maria Loley struggles up the stairs that lead to her church, a tall pink building that towers over the town of Poysdorf. Compared with the huge statues that frame the entrance to the churchyard, 70-year-old Maria looks tiny and frail. Her legs are weak and her bones are brittle. Behind her large glasses her skin is too white, especially when she is tired. "Sometimes," she says wistfully, "I am so tired that I simply want to let it all drop."

But she cannot let "it" drop. Too many people in this small Austrian community have come to rely on her and her mission. People such as Gabriel Yalda, his wife, Feryal, and their small children. Their tale is familiar.

In August 1991, in exchange for $12,000, a smuggler was to drive the Yalda family out of Iraq to freedom. Instead, he deposited them somewhere in a forest near the border of Slovakia and pointed them towards the southwest. Clutching their two suitcases and their children, and soaked by a downpour, the couple inched their way through the night. "We couldn't see where we were going. We couldn't light a match because it would attract attention. The children were crying. We walked for hours not knowing where to go."

Eventually the Yaldas found their way to a village and wondered the streets, bewildered. They came across a local man and, communicating with difficulty, Feryal asked where they were. In Austria, the man said. Gabriel and Feryal cried with relief.

Today the Yalda family lives in the ruins of a medieval castle. The sagging stone wall surrounding it is propped up by wooden planks. A creaking door opens into what was once an imposing entrance hall, where four sets of huge antlers, mounted trophies of a past century, are secured high on the walls. But upstairs, the flat where the Yalda family leaves bears no traces of this faded grandeur. Like the other four refugee families in converted flats in this building, they make do with rickety second hand furniture. Belongings and toys are scattered around. In a central location in the Yalda's flat, above the kitchen table in an ersatz gold frame, an Eastern Orthodox icon of the Madonna looks down into the room. Her kindly expression comforts and soothes.

For the Yaldas, this humble flat in a derelict castle is a safe haven, but it is one which the Austrian government refused to provide. Although they can endured persecution in Iraq because they were Christians - Gabriel was repeatedly sent to fight in the front lines in the Iran-Iraq war even after being severely wounded - Austrian officials deemed the Yaldas unworthy of asylum.

It was the frail, white haired Maria Loley, determined and devout, who brought about their salvation. She provided them with shelter. She still finds them money for heating and food. She gives them comfort and courage. And she fights tirelessly to get the government to allow the Yalda family to stay in Austria and to build a new life.

A retired social worker, Maria stumbled into the salvation business three years ago, when her vicar asked her to do some volunteer work with the town's "foreign guest workers" including Yugoslavia, in the early seventies. As it happened, her first meeting with the guest workers coincided with the beginning of the war in Bosnia and the workers arrived with 20 refugees - husbands and wives, children and parents - who had recently fled the former Yugoslavia to escape the war. Maria found them accommodation in disused church buildings and helped them wade through the bureaucratic process of requesting asylum. As the war in Bosnia became bloodier, more and more refugees came to Poysdorf. Maria helped them as well. Her reputation spread.

Today 600 refugees live in and around the town and they make up roughly one tenth of the population. They include some who have fled persecution or war in Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Albania. There are also exiled Serbs, Iraqis, Turks and Poles.

In Poysdorf they find a complete support system. Maria has "surgery hours" twice a week, where refugees can go to seek counseling. She finds them jobs, housing and second hand furniture. She has arranged German courses for newcomers and she plans community events to bring refugees and locals together. In creating what has become known as the Poysdorf Refugee Project, Maria is now working harder than when she retired because of ill health in 1979.

Funding for Maria's work comes mostly from private donations. Unable to afford an office, she works from a desk in the hall of her tiny home. She has no computer, no fax, and only the money she herself can raise. The fuel that runs the project is Maria's own sense of duty, her quiet determination. The engine is the team of 14 full-time and 50 part-time volunteer aid workers who do whatever they can to help the refugees feel at home.

Poysdorf in in the wine region of northern Lower Austria, where thousands of wooden stakes for grapevines bristle on the hills and fields. It is a deeply Catholic region. The churches, painted pink, white, or yellow, reach up to the heavens from the highest points in the villages. In and around Poysdorf there are 14 small brick structures a few feet high. During Lent, town processions will weave from one to the next reciting hymns and prayers. These are Poysdorf's Stations of the Cross.

Poysdorf also has a black chapter in its history. In 1938, after Austria was forcibly united with Germany, some of the townspeople embraced fascism with fervour. One night, they deported all of the town's Jews to concentration camps, from which they would never return. Then they proudly declared their town Austria's first Jew-free zone.

During the war, devout Catholics in Poysdorf were also victims of persecution. Among them was the family of Maria Loley. The Nazis allowed her father to take only poorly paid jobs as a labourer. Because Maria and her four brothers were not allowed to go to university, they too took on medial jobs to help support the family.

"I think it was at that time that the basic structure of my personality developed," says Maria, who has never married. "My work as an agricultural labourer gave me much time, peace and quiet to think bout myself. Doing this work my spiritual life developed. In my time off in the evenings I spent many quiet hours in the church building. I think that is where the foundations for my entire life were laid."

The Zukic family are just one of the many who have benefited from this dedication. Today they are being visited by Hedwig and Rudolf Bauer, two of Maria's volunteers. Outside their backyard fence, a grassy hill swells up, looking like a backdrop to a Hollywood movie. A thin, elderly woman, her hair hidden by a cream-coloured scarf, greets the Bauers with a nod. She disappears when her 39-year-old son Halid, welcomes the couple into his home.

Halid Zukic, his mother Seciba, his wife Dzehua and their son Adem are Bosnian Muslims who lived in Teslic, where Halid worked as a carpenter. Teslic is near Banja Luka, an ethnic Serb stronghold in Bosnia. In May 1992, after Teslic was occupied, Halid was held prisoner by the Serbs and taken to the front line to dig Serbian trenches. He and the other prisoners were used as a human shield when the Muslim forces attacked. Back at their detention camp, those lucky enough to have survived the gunfire were forced to sleep in open ditches during rainy nights and to endure periodic beatings. Occasionally, the men were brought back to their families. After a few weeks, however, they would be taken away again.

In November 1993, the Zukic family were "ethnically cleansed". They were ordered to board a bus that took them to the Hungarian border. From there, Halid and his family managed to get to Austria, where his three brothers had been working. Halid applied for asylum but was refused because he entered the country illegally. But the appeal was in his favour and Halid and his family were granted asylum - a status that legally entitles them to live and work in Austria like naturalized citizens for the rest of their lives. Once he was permitted to work, he found a job as a carpenter for a local building firm.

Throughout the application procedure, the Bauers were there to help in any way they could. This cooperation between locals and newcomers has brought the Poysdorf project much praise. "The way Maria runs the project is amazing," says Melita Sunjic, a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who gave Maria an award for running the best refugee project in Austria last year. "By matching refugees with local families, she has managed to establish a real, close, personal contact and integration into the community. Many prejudices that may have existed before just disappear because they get to know each othe as people."

None of this, however, has been as simple as it may sound. True, there have been many times since the Second World War when Austria has taken in refugees: when ethnic Germans were expelled from southern Moravia after the war; after the Communist clamp downs in Hungary in 1966 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968; and following the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981. When the war broke out in Bosnia, there might have seemed little reason to believe this spirit had changed. But this would have been to ignore the upsurge in anti-foreigner feeling in recent years - so much so that the right-wing, anti-foreigner Freedom Party won 23 percent of the vote in the general election last October, compared with 16.5 per cent four years earlier.

The government, perhaps sensing this growing intolerance for foreigners, passed the Fremdengesetz (Foreigners Act) in June 1992, which gave it the right to imprison illegal residents in Austria, many of whom are refugees. In July 1993, an additional set of anti-immigration laws came into force. Under this new legislation, asylum seekers may be rejected if they have no papers, if they have spent more than two weeks in a so-called "safe country' such as Slovenia, before they entered Austria, or even if their flat is too small - under ten square meters per person.

As a result, fewer than three percent of asylum seekers currently make it into the country. Border officials are stringent, demanding proper documents even from desperate refugees who have had no time, before escaping danger, to apply for a passport or visa. Maria believes that the border officials turn people away arbitrarily. "When we hear refugees are rejected for no particular reason, we suggest they wait until the border officials change shifts - then try again."

Even inside Austria, the uncertainty for refugees continues. Those who cannot fulfill the narrow requirement necessary to be granted asylum may be granted the status of a de facto refugee if their lives are at risk in their home countries. While de facto refugees receive some financial assistance from the government, they are not allowed to work in Austria and they will be deported when the threat in their home country is deemed to have subsided. Their deportation orders are stayed for six months at a time, but Maria says refugees live in fear that each six-month stay will be their last. "For people who have already experienced so much trauma, this is psychological torture: there are rumours that this time, they really will be deported; they have nightmares that Austria's "foreigner police" will take them away in the night."

The young people in Café Holiday, with its pink fluffy curtains and prints of Twenties flappers on the walls, seem to have no such fears. These teenagers are mostly foreign and they congregate at the bar. One looks like Rod Stewart with dental problems. Another, wearing a black leather jacket, sits quietly brooding and sucking on a cigarette. A bulky local man in his 30s, wearing faded jeans and a stained denim shirt, breezes in and scowls at the foreigners. He passes through to another room in the nightclub to be with his Austrian friends.

Vullnet Hamzai, the teenager wearing the leather jacket, doesn't flinch. He says, "When I first came from Macedonia and couldn't speak German, some jerks would call me names and once a few guys tried to beat me up. But now I speak German and I have both German and Austrian friends and when people call me names I just ignore them." He goes in to the disco and starts dancing with an Austrian girl.

But there are still those, such as the members of the Poysdorf Social Democratic Party, who want to stop the flow of refugees to the town. One of their representatives, Egon Englisch, a postal worker, says, "In Austria we have the expression 'The boat is full'. There are too many refugees here and often the housing isn't adequate. And some people are afraid that the refugees working for lower wages will take their jobs."

This, of course, is to ignore the fact that the majority of refugees in Austria are not actually permitted to work. Rufida Ejupovic, a Muslim woman, is one of them. She explains how important it is for her self-esteem, and her sanity, to be allowed to find a job. Rufida and her two teenage daughters came from Bosnia where they were forced to watch on as her husband was shot dead by Bosnian Serbs. His corpse was left lying on the street for four days until the Serbs took it away. "I am very depressed all the time," she says. "I am crying for my husband. My good friend here has recently been reunited with her husband, but I will never be. I have too much time to think about these things. I desperately need to find a job here in Austria and start a new life."

As Maria enters her church on Sunday morning, these are the people who crowd her mind. She says, "I wouldn't be honest if I said that I didn't sometimes wish for more peace and quiet in my life. But then there were people in concentration camps in Bosnia who have to struggle day after day and pull through. So I say that I, too, must carry on. And I carry on until the next day. And in doing that, I feel that God gives me strength.

She dabs her forehead with water upon entering the church. The interior dazzles with gilt statues of cherubs and saints. She sits alone in her pew and waits to be regenerated by holy words and hymns.

Thus Maria's ark continues to float above the tides. And she continues to whisk the needy from the floodwater below. But Maria harbours no illusion that the storm will subside. "Now the war in Bosnia has started again there will be more refugees coming," she says. And with Christian song swelling up around her, Maria prays she will be able to help those people too.