Viennese of the week

Against the cold, inside and out

When the temperatures drop, selfless help is needed.(Bild: Caritas)

Winter is approaching, and the plight of homeless people in Vienna becomes all the harder with every single degree Celsius drop in the outside temperature. For the city and Caritas, this means: the warming rooms are opened, the emergency sleeping facilities are expanded and the street workers go out into the cold nights.

The time when others are snuggled up in their warm homes has always been the hardest for the homeless. They are also increasingly confronted with social coldness. However, only very few of them have become homeless through their own fault, as a detail from the winter aid provided by the Vienna Social Fund (FSW) shows: It now also needs winter accommodation for 40 homeless families.

Real help only knows two questions
Life crises, illness, unemployment or poverty despite having a job - if you don't have a network of family and friends to catch you, the tipping point to homelessness is closer than you can imagine in a warm apartment. But the fact that the helpers don't ask why you are living on the street, but simply help, makes them our "Viennese of the week": real help doesn't ask whether you have a right to help. Real help only asks whether and how you can help.

Helpers may need support themselves
The helpers themselves do not want to be thanked. They would rather you help them help you, for example by donating to Caritas for a hot soup at www.wirhelfen.shop.

But you can also help without any money at all: by downloading the city's cold app onto your cell phone(www.kaelteapp.wien) or saving the telephone number of the Caritas cold phone [phone]). In both ways, you can alert the FSW and Caritas teams to people who are still exposed to the cold without help.