In the town of Kharkiv, in northeast Ukraine, there’s a kindergarten classroom with brilliant yellow and inexperienced partitions and lengthy, gauzy curtains. It’s full of toys and books.

The lockers — purple, inexperienced and yellow with identify tags on the entrance: Sofiia, Daniel, Bohdan — are nonetheless full of youngsters’s belongings: sneakers, backpacks and a drawing of a snowman.

But today, there are not any youngsters.

A blessing, provided that on a sunny day final August, a Russian artillery assault hit the college constructing, shattering almost each window within the classroom. A destiny hundreds of colleges throughout Ukraine have met for the reason that conflict with Russia started.

“It’s not the damage to the school that I mourn,” Yana Tsyhanenko, the pinnacle of faculty, stated that day as she surveyed the injury, the glass crunching beneath her ft. “It’s the destruction of childhood.”

Under the mud and particles, the classroom informed a narrative of life earlier than the conflict, of the lives of 27 college students and their trainer, disrupted and ceaselessly modified.

The lunch menu with the date Feb. 24 — the day that Russia invaded — was nonetheless hanging on the wall, promoting the buckwheat soup and cabbage that was by no means served. A chess recreation was frozen mid-match, ready for somebody to make the subsequent transfer.

Near a window, a cluster of plastic pots with the sprouts of African violets sat on a desk, every flower planted by a scholar within the days earlier than colleges in Kharkiv shut down. A present for his or her moms. Ready to develop. Full of potential.

So usually in conflict, the buildings which have been broken are probably the most seen. But what concerning the invisible injury? The human, less-deadly, far-deeper scars?

What had occurred to the youngsters who as soon as discovered right here?

Answering that query started an eight-month journey throughout Ukraine and Europe and to the United States. Time spent with youngsters who now need to drive tanks or fly jets once they develop up, who’ve hassle sleeping, and who’re scared. Friendships uprooted, youngsters struggling to recollect, others desirous to neglect. But additionally youngsters laughing and studying new languages — and starting to dream.

Their tales make up one kindergarten classroom, however in addition they signify the hundreds of thousands of kids from Ukraine who’ve left and who’ve stayed.

A yearbook, a textual content chat and a ebook about each scholar

The trainer accountable for that inexperienced classroom is Iryna Sahan, who mixes kindness and authority in a manner solely somebody with almost 30 years in a classroom can do. In her condominium in Kharkiv’s northeast, she unwraps a package deal of newly printed yearbooks. Each ebook is full of pictures of her 27 kindergartners. She will get goosebumps as she turns the pages, describing them. “Aurora had a big personality. Sofiia was always in charge. Simeon convinced me to buy that chess set.”

Her classroom was like a household. Everyone was busy studying, taking part in and studying.

“An anthill,” she says, “constantly in motion.”

Kharkiv is the second-largest metropolis in Ukraine, simply an hour from the border with Russia. And in these first days of conflict, it was a scary place. At 7 a.m. on Feb. 24, the morning of the invasion, Sahan despatched a textual content message to the classroom’s group chat: “Dear Parents … this is the information we have at the moment,” she wrote. All colleges in Kharkiv are closed.

In the times that adopted, the mother and father used the textual content chain to share evacuation routes, information of energy outages, and their households’ plans for the place they’d go.

Of the 27 college students in that inexperienced and yellow kindergarten class, finally, greater than half would depart the nation — driving south by means of Moldova or west into Poland. For some, it was simpler. They had family members overseas, preexisting plans to to migrate, or a vacation spot in thoughts. For others, it was a lot more durable: weeks or months residing in refugee camps in Poland and Germany; continuously shifting from one nation to a different in the hunt for housing, jobs and stability.

Through that group chat and social media, Sahan follows their journeys in Spain, the United States, Latvia and Germany.

About a dozen of the households stayed in Ukraine, leaving Kharkiv for locations farther west: Kyiv, Lviv, Khmelnytskyi.

They packed flippantly and left in a rush.

By September, just one household was nonetheless residing within the metropolis of Kharkiv.

An empty playground in a metropolis that is residence

Sofiia Kuzmina, one of many oldest of Iryna Sahan’s former college students, is assured and tall; her shoulder-length blond hair is usually pulled up in a knot on the prime of her head. She likes to bop and sing and play dress-up. Yellow is her favourite shade.

On a transparent afternoon in September, she spins on the steel merry-go-round on the playground that separates her household’s condominium constructing from the kindergarten, with the destroyed rainbow steps and the boarded-up home windows within the background.

Now enrolled in a web-based first grade, she says she nonetheless remembers all the things about kindergarten: the hairdressing station the place Iryna Sahan braided her hair, taking part in video games together with her good friend Aurora, studying to put in writing her identify together with her good friend Bohdan.

As her mom watches from a close-by bench, she provides up on the playground tools and heads for a row of bushes, the place she begins to gather leaves and sticks, mumbling to herself as she searches.

There are not any different youngsters on the playground. Kharkiv, which is continuously shelled by Russian forces at night time, stays fairly empty. As Sofiia gathers her leaf assortment, Natalia Kuzmina explains that her daughter has gotten used to taking part in by herself.

Sofiia approaches and palms her mother a pile of greens. “It’s salad,” she says with a smile. Natalia pretends to take a chunk. “Thank you. Yum yum!”

In the weeks following the invasion final February, Sofiia’s household left the town and hung out at a cottage farther west. But it was short-lived, and so they quickly returned. “I wanted to go back,” Sofiia explains, resting her head on her mom’s shoulder, “because here I can choose any of my toys, and there I didn’t have any toys.”

Natalia says that regardless of the hazard at residence, she will be able to’t think about shifting and residing elsewhere. “I came back to Kharkiv for my children. It’s important that children stay at home,” she says. “And for me, I’m the person for whom it is really difficult to adjust.”

But she and her husband have struggled to search out work right here, and being so near the preventing has its challenges for Sofiia. Natalia explains that earlier than the invasion, her daughter was a frontrunner within the kindergarten, social and calm. But the conflict has modified her. “Now she reacts to everything in a more emotional way,” Natalia says. “She will demand something or be argumentative. Sometimes she will cry with no reason.”

Her mother and father do all the things they’ll to protect Sofiia from what’s occurring. They do not speak concerning the conflict together with her, and so they attempt to put Sofiia to mattress earlier than the nightly shelling begins so she sleeps by means of the explosions. “The earlier, the better,” Natalia says, laughing. She’s not above mendacity if she has to: “Oh, that loud sound? That’s just a car … or maybe construction. Nothing to worry about.”

Growing up right away

About 13 hours throughout Ukraine by practice, within the western metropolis of Lviv, Bohdan Semenukha’s mother, Viktoria, has taken a really totally different strategy.

“Our children know everything,” she explains, as she sits on the sofa in an condominium her household borrows from mates. Her son, Sofiia’s former classmate, Bohdan, sits subsequent to her. She begins to quiz him.

“Who made you leave Kharkiv?”

“Russia,” he says, trying up at her, his small face eagerly awaiting the subsequent query.

“Why do you love Ukraine?”

“Because I was born here,” he says.

“Who made Ukrainians leave their home?”

“Putin.”

They left Kharkiv in a panic final February, driving 36 hours to succeed in Lviv, near the border with Poland. Viktoria says it is the most secure place they might be that is nonetheless in Ukraine. Bohdan’s father stayed behind in Kharkiv, aiding the army of their protection.

“Bohdan grew up in an instant,” Viktoria says, as Bohdan performs with the household canine, Simba, who made the journey to Lviv sitting on Bohdan’s lap. “We didn’t have time for filtering things. He saw everything.” At first, he was anxious, she says. He began to regress, usually sucking on the nook of his T-shirt. Unlike Sofiia’s mother, Viktoria felt that telling him all the things would possibly assist him regain some energy and management.

In western Ukraine, the conflict can really feel farther away than in Kharkiv, however air raid sirens are nonetheless frequent in Lviv, and there have been a handful of current missile strikes.

As Bohdan and his mother had been driving residence from college in the future this winter, an air raid siren went off. Bohdan leaned ahead and requested his mother, “Does it mean that there are rockets above or missiles in the sky?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Viktoria tells him.

“But what if they can get us?” he squeaks, his palms holding the seat in entrance of him.

It’s a fragile stability, of realizing what’s occurring however nonetheless having the ability to simply be a child. At this second, Viktoria reassures him it is OK. She usually does this when he will get anxious or confused.

Two greatest mates, torn aside by conflict

On the day Iryna Sahan shared that yearbook of all the youngsters in her class, she pointed to a photograph of two blond youngsters smiling up on the digital camera. “This is young love,” she stated, laughing.

They’re in so many pictures collectively. Sitting subsequent to one another, marching down the corridor, one in entrance of the opposite. Aurora Demchenko, headstrong and candy, and Daniel Bizyayev, who loves soccer and is an effective listener. Sahan remembered how they’d sit subsequent to one another and giggle, typically distracting the opposite college students.

What had occurred to them? Were they nonetheless in contact?

All Sahan knew was that the conflict had pushed these two greatest mates the farthest away of any of her college students — from Kharkiv, and from one another.

The Bizyayevs now reside in a suburban neighborhood about an hour north of New York City. On a crisp November afternoon, Daniel steps off the yellow college bus he is ridden residence and takes his mother Kristina’s hand. They move pumpkins and yard ghosts, left over from Halloween, on their strategy to their white two-story home with a big flag within the window. It’s half Ukrainian and half American.

Their new home, which Daniel shares along with his mother and father and two brothers, is fairly empty. There is a few primary furnishings and a room full of toys, however the partitions stay naked. They left Ukraine so quick, they weren’t in a position to take a lot with them. Daniel’s been lacking his bed room again in Kharkiv. “There were so many books,” he remembers. “There were so many stories.”

He does have one hardcover ebook that reminds him of earlier than the conflict: It’s a model of that kindergarten yearbook Iryna Sahan had in Kharkiv.

“This is me and this is me,” he says, pointing to pictures of himself. In so most of the pictures of Daniel, Aurora is standing proper subsequent to him. Often, they’re holding palms.

“She likes to play soccer and to play cars,” he says. They had been all the time collectively, says Kristina, who’s been standing close by. “Daniel loves her because she is not so girlish.”

Daniel’s mother and father, Kristina, who labored in advertising, and Yevgeniy, who ran a textile enterprise, had been planning to immigrate to the United States since earlier than Daniel was born. He’d been studying English in anticipation, whereas the adults labored on saving cash, getting the paperwork collectively and coordinating with Yevgeniy’s brother, who lives within the States. When the invasion got here final February, they moved up their timeline.

“We wanted to save our lives and the lives of our children,” Kristina explains. “For us, it was obvious to leave.” As a mother or father, she says, you make selections day-after-day. When to get up. To drink espresso. “Some decisions are harder to make than others,” she says. “We never imagined we’d have to make this decision, but that’s what we did.”

After the invasion, they stayed first in Moldova, Romania, after which Germany. Daniel’s youngest brother, Leo, spent his first birthday in a refugee camp. In April, they arrived in West Haven, Conn., to stick with a bunch household they’d by no means met however related with by means of the web site UkraineTakeShelter.com. And then proper earlier than the college yr began, they moved into that white home in New York state.

While Daniel’s been making new mates at college and on his soccer crew, he is actually been lacking Ukraine — and Aurora. At night time, he hugs his stuffed bear, pretending it is her. Over the summer season, Daniel despatched her a video message. “Kisses for you,” he says, blowing kisses on the digital camera.

Aurora and her household by no means answered that message Daniel despatched. Was it too painful to remain in contact? Or had they only gotten busy, adjusting to life in a brand new nation?

“I don’t remember”

Nearly 4,000 miles away, in Valencia, Spain, Aurora Demchenko’s new college has a slide that goes all the way in which right down to the lower-level ground, half inside and half outdoors. It’s a world college, with instruction in English, the place she and her two older brothers now go to class.

A number of months after the go to with Daniel’s household, Aurora is at college, sitting with two different women on the blue foam carpet within the first-grade classroom. She wears her white and navy blue college uniform. Her lengthy blond hair is pinned up with a purple Minnie Mouse bow.

“Aurora, how are you feeling today?” her trainer, Amanda Green, asks. “So-so,” Aurora replies in a quiet voice. “So-so,” Green repeats. “Thank you for being honest.”

As class begins, college students chatter in a large number of languages: English, Spanish, slightly German and Russian. The college’s college students come from all around the world, however in simply this classroom, Aurora is one in every of seven Ukrainian youngsters.

In Ukraine, Iryna Sahan remembers Aurora having an enormous persona, however in her new class, she is extra timid and reserved. When she began college right here within the fall, she may hardly communicate any English.

“Aurora, at the beginning, was quite guarded in terms of what she expressed,” Green says whereas on a break from instructing. “She’d get really frustrated, get really angry, and couldn’t express what that was like. Sometimes she couldn’t finish a task, but it wasn’t really about the task.”

But during the last a number of months, her English has gotten higher, and he or she’s slowly popping out of her shell. At a college efficiency over the winter, different lecturers seen what an ideal performer she was, singing all of the songs loudly and doing all the dance strikes. “It was just really sweet to see her so involved,” Green remembers. “It must have been really hard for her, considering half of the time she didn’t know what she was singing because she doesn’t have the vocabulary. But she absolutely loved it.”

Aurora’s household, her three brothers and her mother and father, Maryna and Alex, had vacationed in Valencia, a coastal metropolis in Spain, throughout earlier summers. Before the conflict, Alex labored in Kharkiv’s booming tech sector and had a number of contacts in Spain. When Russia invaded, they packed up their automobile and determined this was the place they’d head. Like many Ukrainian refugees, they have been granted momentary safety to reside in Europe.

They now reside in a high-rise condominium, and over do-it-yourself bowls of rassolnik, a dill and pickle soup, the household tells how once they first arrived in Valencia, it was throughout Las Fallas, the town’s weeklong hearth competition. The streets had been full of loud music, events and fireworks.

“Aurora kept saying, ‘It’s bombing outside. We need to go to the basement,’ ” her father, Alex, remembers.

With a lot change and uncertainty, the household has clung to reminders of residence, like the only fork her 13-year-old brother, Sasha, introduced from their kitchen in Kharkiv. It had been contained in the backpack he grabbed as they fled. Now everybody fights over it.

Another reminder of residence? A duplicate of that yearbook Iryna Sahan confirmed us in Kharkiv. A good friend of Sahan introduced it to Spain final fall, and the Demchenkos drove two hours simply to choose it up. Aurora and her mother, Maryna, unfold out on the mattress and leaf by means of the ebook. Maryna factors out footage of Aurora and her greatest good friend Daniel, now 4,000 miles away within the United States.

“Remember, you always tried to keep a place for Daniel?” she asks. “Remember when your teacher would scold you two for being too silly?” She imitates Iryna Sahan’s stern voice: “Aurora! Daniel!”

“No, I don’t remember,” Aurora says.

“You don’t remember? But your teacher Iryna told me,” her mother says.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember,” Aurora says, rising impatient. “No, it didn’t happen.”

“You have forgotten about this, haven’t you?” Maryna says.

Aurora finds consolation together with her brothers, particularly Sasha. The two of them dump a pile of Legos on the ground in a bed room, constructing a tower collectively. Sasha tries once more to ask Aurora concerning the kindergarten. She remembers some issues — the borscht for lunch, the issues she discovered, the video games she performed — however she does not need to discuss others. When he whispers, “Do you want to see your friends, do you want to visit Daniel?” she is visibly uncomfortable and storms off.

“Maybe because of the problems within Ukraine,” Sasha explains. Maybe there is a unhappiness, he says, “maybe she thinks she will not see them again.”

Trauma manifests in numerous methods, however youngsters are resilient

All of the youngsters in Sahan’s kindergarten class, whether or not they left Ukraine or stayed, have skilled trauma within the final yr. Coping with these troublesome circumstances can manifest in very other ways in youngsters, explains Maryam Kia-Keating, a psychologist and professor on the University of California, Santa Barbara who research refugee and immigrant populations.

Kia-Keating has labored with youngsters who really feel helpless or unsure, have problem falling asleep, or battle to explain in phrases what’s bothering them.

Daniel and Aurora’s time collectively on the kindergarten “is both a painful memory as much as it is a beautiful one,” she says. Memory loss, or blocking out painful recollections, can also be one of many methods the human mind tries to deal with one thing traumatic.

“Aurora’s memory loss could be her brain helping her put the past aside and moving forward into the future,” she explains. “She really has a lot to contend with. She has three languages, a new country, and all the other factors that are going on in her life.”

But youngsters are extraordinarily resilient and adept at adjusting, she says. “They pick up new languages, they pick up the new culture, they even pick up the new identity. It’s a survival mechanism that really works in our favor when we’re young.”

Staying busy in an effort to transfer on

While Aurora has been adjusting to life in Spain, Daniel’s mother and father have saved him busy, constructing his life in New York. There are Ukrainian courses, swimming classes and soccer observe, after-school actions and a break-dancing class.

On a go to to their home in February, his mother and father, Kristina and Yevgeniy, share a brand new rule: There isn’t any extra discuss Aurora.

Over the winter, they met with a psychologist at an occasion for Ukrainian refugees, explaining how Daniel is having a tough time letting go of his recollections of Ukraine and of Aurora. When he seems by means of that yearbook, when he talks about Aurora, he may be unhappy for days. The psychologist suggests it’s nice to speak concerning the previous when Daniel brings it up, however Kristina and her husband should not remind him.

So they have been avoiding it.

In the center of the lounge, Daniel exhibits off his new dancing abilities, whereas his brothers Adam and Leo run round him. He launches right into a head and shoulder stand on the ground, utilizing his palms to spin.

“Turn just a little bit and stand,” he demonstrates. “That’s how you make it spin.”

Daniel lately turned 7 and had a party with youngsters from his first grade class and from his soccer crew. In a video from the occasion, the youngsters are laughing and having time. New recollections are vital, Kristina says as she watches it. “Look, Daniel’s really happy.” He’s even gotten some new books, in Russian and Ukrainian, to fill these empty bookshelves.

“It took time for him to understand that we are not going to see our friends in Ukraine for a while,” she says. “Now he talks about Aurora less and less.”

The youngsters’s roots will all the time be in Ukraine

It’s now been greater than a yr since these youngsters rehearsed poems, laughed and discovered in that inexperienced and yellow classroom again in Kharkiv.

While the conflict is much from over, a counteroffensive late final fall pushed again Russian forces across the metropolis. A number of households from the kindergarten class have returned.

Sofiia Kuzmina welcomes the change. She is much less bored and extra social.

While on-line college hardly ever occurs, due to frequent energy outages, her singing classes have resumed in individual. In an after-school heart not removed from her residence, she warms up by singing Do Re Mi Fa So, as the trainer performs the notes on a piano. Sofiia is engaged on a solo, and he or she takes the microphone because the instrumental monitor performs from the audio system. The different women watch as she sways and belts out the track, a semblance of regular in a nonetheless chaotic time.

Dance classes are additionally in full swing. Sofiia splits, twists and spins as pop music blares throughout the mirror-lined studio.

Even in any case this time, her mother, Natalia, says Sofiia nonetheless talks concerning the kindergarten class within the current tense. “I think about the kindergarten before I fall asleep at night,” Sofiia says from her bed room, full of toys. “I think about it and what it would be like if there wasn’t a war, if me and all my friends were back there.”

Across Ukraine in Lviv, Bohdan’s mother, Viktoria, remains to be adamant that Bohdan does not neglect what’s occurring in his nation.They continuously go to the Lychakiv cemetery, only a few blocks from their condominium, to pay tribute to those that have died on this conflict.

On a current afternoon, they stroll slowly alongside the rows of freshly dug graves, the mounds of filth coated in ribbons with footage and flowers, a slight dusting of snow lingering on the petals.

“I want my son to see this,” Viktoria says. “To feel this sacrifice.”

With Bohdan in tow, they strategy a household standing on the finish of one of many gravesites. At their ft, a portrait of a younger man in uniform. Viktoria and Bohdan stand with the household for a second. Bohdan holds his mother’s hand.

He’s quiet as they stroll again to the automobile. His mother is in tears. “When you see how many people are there,” she says. “They are somebody’s son, husband, father.” Bohdan pipes in: “Someone’s grandsons!”

Viktoria does not need to protect Bohdan from this ache, from this hate, that she feels. She thinks of Bohdan, of his classmates, as youngsters who might not get a say of their future. A era formed by conflict.

Back in Kharkiv, within the kindergarten classroom, the chairs and desks are actually stacked up within the heart, and the books and toys are all put away. But there are specific issues Iryna Sahan has left intact. The names of the youngsters — Sofiia, Bohdan, Daniel — are nonetheless pinned on the lockers and on their nap-time beds.

“I can’t bring myself to remove them,” Sahan says. “These are my children and until the moment I have a new group, I won’t remove them.”

In the nook, nonetheless on that desk by the window, there’s a cluster of pots, with thick inexperienced leaves — the African violets that the youngsters planted within the days earlier than the invasion.

Not all of them survived. But a few of them did.

“Maybe it’s symbolic. Maybe it’s how it was meant to be,” Sahan says.

She and the opposite lecturers have been watering them.

This story was edited by Steve Drummond, Nishant Dahiya and Desiree F. Hicks. The audio was produced by Lauren Migaki. Photo modifying by Emily Bogle. Copy modifying by Pam Webster. Design and growth by Connie Hanzhang Jin.

Hanna Palamarenko contributed to this story from Ukraine and Spain.