The Sunday Story: Two kindergartners, torn apart by war
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Today we've got a story that begins in a kindergarten classroom in the city of Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine. It's got green and yellow walls. It's filled with toys and books. And before the war, it was filled with children. It was once a place where children played chess and grew flowers and they learned and they laughed.

where 27 little six-year-olds started every day with a hug. And then in February of the year 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and everything for those six-year-olds changed. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. NPR's Alyssa Nadwerny has spent eight months telling the story of what happened in the year after that to the families in that kindergarten and their teacher. And she joins me now. Hey, Alyssa. Hi, Rachel. Hi, Rachel.

I can't wait to hear this story. Let's start at the beginning. When did you first visit this kindergarten classroom? Well, it was August of last year, and the empty school building had been hit by Russian artillery. It's not clear if it was targeted, but...

Over the course of the war, about 3,000 schools have been damaged across Ukraine. That's why they're online. And I did a story for Morning Edition, and actually you were hosting. Yeah, I remember that. This was right before the school year normally would have started in Ukraine, right? That's exactly right. And it was, you know, a good reminder of why the government had shut down the country's schools because of the attack. Right.

So I was in Hargreeve at the time, and I heard about the school being hit. We decided to go and see the damage. Here's a clip from the story that I filed.

Nearly all the windows are broken, so glass is everywhere. The brightly colored stairs that lead to the first classroom are destroyed. Sayenko points to the top step, which is stained with blood. When the building was hit, two teachers' assistants happened to be taking out the trash. They're both in the hospital. So that was Yana Sayenko. She's the head of the school, and she was giving me a tour of the damage. And...

Under the layers of the dust and debris that was all over this classroom, there were these things that hinted at a life before. So little beds that still had the stuffed animals on the pillow. The lunch menu. Oh, my gosh. This gave me such chills when I saw it. The lunch menu from the day of the invasion, February 24th, was still hanging on the wall.

They were going to have buckwheat soup and cabbage. Of course, that was never served. And as I was leaving, Yana said this to me. It's not the damage to the school that I'm mourning. It's the destruction of childhood.

It's hard to hear that. I mean, childhood was changed for so many Ukrainian kids. What did it feel like to you being witness to that, being in that classroom, which sounds like it was sort of a time capsule, right? Well, you know, of course there was like such delight of just being in a really bright kindergarten classroom. I mean, that's what initially drew me in and I didn't want to leave. Mm-hmm.

And then kind of this juxtaposition of this other sadness of, you know, broken windows and debris all over. I went on to cover a lot more damaged buildings in Ukraine, but I couldn't stop thinking about that classroom. And I wanted to know what had happened to the children who had once learned there.

So let's take a step back for a second if we can. Can you just explain more about Kharkiv itself, what the city is like, what happened when the Russians attacked? Yeah. So Kharkiv is about an hour from the border with Russia, and it saw frequent missile and artillery attacks at the very beginning and throughout the year. I mean, for months, people were sleeping down there.

So let's get back to the kids. I mean, you were tracking this particular kindergarten class, 27 children. What did you learn? What's happened to them?

Well, they are spread out all over the world. So many families left in a hurry with just a suitcase. A little boy named Bodan, he took this video as he and his family fled. The best one of them all.

And it's super early in the morning, so the footage is really dark, and you can just see these lines of cars trying to leave the city. The whole family, you know, his sisters, his mom, his grandma, they packed in the car. His dad stayed behind to help the military in Kharkiv, and now they're all the way across Ukraine in Lviv.

His kindergarten class, the students in that class, about half of those families actually left the country. They're now in Spain, the U.S., Latvia, and Germany. How did you find them, Alyssa? How did you track them down? Well, I started with their teacher, Irina Sahan. She's been teaching little kids for nearly 30 years, and we visited her in her apartment in Harkis.

She stayed behind to take care of her elderly mom. So she doesn't have any new kids, so she's still really invested in this class.

And when we were there, she took out a yearbook. And the yearbook had pictures of all the kids. So she's pointing out all these kids. Aurora, you know, she has a big personality. This is Simeon. He plays chess. He convinced me to get a chess set. I mean, she's saying, like, you could write a whole book about all of my kids. And...

And how are they doing?

Well, of all the children, you know, whether they stayed in Ukraine or left, they've experienced some sort of trauma, right? And that manifests in a lot of different ways. I spent time over the last eight months with kids who are having trouble sleeping, who are scared, who have been torn away from their best friends. But I also saw children laughing and learning new languages and beginning to dream because six-year-olds are actually quite resilient, right?

I want to tell you about one who has moved the farthest away from Kharkiv. His name is Daniel.

And his family now lives in Westchester County, New York. Seems sort of random, but what's the backstory? Why did they end up so long ways from Kharkiv, Westchester? Yeah, yeah. So the family was always planning to leave Ukraine and come to the U.S. The war sped up their timeline. So after the invasion, they stayed in Eastern Europe, Moldova, Romania, and then Germany. Daniel's youngest brother, Leo, actually spent his first birthday in a refugee camp there. And in April...

They arrived in West Haven, Connecticut, and they stayed with a host family they'd never met but found online. And then finally, right before the school year, they moved into a house in New York State. Daniel is in some ways doing really well. I mean, he's making new friends, he's playing soccer. But in other ways, he's been really struggling. In his Harkiv kindergarten class, he had this best friend, a little girl named Aurora, who his teacher talked about earlier, that one with the big personality name.

They were inseparable. And when I went to visit the family in November...

His mom brought out the yearbook and opened it up. And here's a moment from the story I want you to hear. This is me. And this is me. And this is me. It's a version of that yearbook Irina Sahan showed us in Harkeve. His mom got digital proofs and printed the book. Where's Aurora? He points to a picture of the two of them, posing for the camera, their desks in the background. What's happening in that photo? Just standing next to her. Just standing next to her, huh? Yeah. What do you remember about her?

She likes to play soccer. Daniel loves her because she's not so girlish. He likes to play with cards. What seemed clear to me on this visit is that Daniel was holding on pretty hard to his life back in Ukraine and certainly his friendship with Aurora, that little girl he hadn't seen in almost a year.

His mom told me that he had this special stuffed teddy bear. He says, I pretend that it's Aurora and I just hug her and yeah, it's hard. I just couldn't imagine what's going on in his head and in his soul. I mean, kids are resilient. Families move all the time. Young kids, they make new friends.

It's just that when it happens kind of in the midst of warm and out of the blue, like the timeline was totally, you know, off kilter. Kids process that in a lot of different ways. And Daniel, he just wasn't ready to leave.

I think also knowing you can't go back. Yeah. That's really hard. And his parents, they eventually consulted a psychologist who recommended, hey, why don't you just not discuss Aurora, you know, the kindergarten, all that stuff in Ukraine with him unless he brings it up. You know, let him take the lead. Don't remind him. Are they doing that? Are they trying that strategy? And is it helping in any way?

When I went back in February, they had been doing that. They had been avoiding this and kind of keeping Daniel super busy. Like he's taking swimming lessons and break dancing lessons and like all this stuff. And they told me he's been talking about Aurora less and less. We'll be right back.

I'm Rachel Martin, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. We're talking with NPR's Alyssa Navarone about what's happened to a kindergarten class from Kharkiv, Ukraine. One little boy, Daniel, still misses his best friend. She and her family also fled the fighting and left the country. So Alyssa, you also visited that little girl. You spent time with Aurora. Where is she now and how's she doing?

So Aurora is now with her family in Valencia, Spain. They live in a high-rise apartment. Her parents are a bit torn about whether it's kind of a permanent move or whether they're going to go back to Ukraine. They've got four kids, so she's got three very energetic brothers. And keeping them in school in person is a really big priority.

The thing about Aurora and my visit there, when I finally met her, I was expecting this, like, big personality. Because that's what Irina Sahan, her teacher in Ukraine, had told me. But the girl that I met was shy and kind of withdrawn. I'm Alyssa. What's your name? Aurora. Life right now, it's a bit overwhelming. She's learning English at school and in the afternoons. Hola, Aurora!

She takes Zoom lessons in Ukrainian and Spanish. The apartment has a familiar emptiness, like Daniel's home. But there are a few reminders of Kharkiv, a painting in Ukrainian colors, and that yellow yearbook from the kindergarten. Aurora and her mom Marina spread out on the bed and leafed through the book. A friend of the kindergarten teacher, Irina Sahan, had brought it to Spain. The family drove two hours just to pick it up.

As they look through, Marina points out pictures of Aurora and Daniel. Do you remember you always saved a seat for him? No. No, I don't remember, Aurora says. You were inseparable. I don't remember, Aurora says. The next day, I asked Aurora again about the kindergarten and Ukraine. And, you know, she remembers some things, like the borscht she had for lunch and some of the games that she played.

But she didn't want to talk about other stuff. And when her 13-year-old brother, Sasha, brought up Daniel, her best friend, she was visibly uncomfortable and actually stormed off ending our chat. Wow. I mean, you can imagine that it's a coping mechanism, right? I mean, did you learn from her parents? Like, is she refusing to talk about it because it's too painful or does she really not remember anything?

So we talked to her first grade teacher at our new school in Valencia, and she told us that Aurora is just really guarded. You know, she gets super frustrated really easily. She's dealing with a lot in that little head. And I talked with child psychologists about this, too. I mean, memory loss, blocking out painful memories. It's one of the ways that the human brain tries to cope with trauma, right?

I want to play you a clip from Mariam Kia Keating. She's a psychologist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies refugee and immigrant populations. For Aurora, I think it's a painful memory as much as it is a beautiful one.

It's unclear whether that memory is just completely gone and it's her brain helping her put the past aside and move forward into the future. She really has a lot to contend with. She has three languages, a new country, and we don't even know what all of the other factors are going on in her life. Yeah.

So that's life and all its complications for two of the students who aren't in Ukraine anymore. But some of them stayed, right? Some kids from that kindergarten class are still in Ukraine. That's right. Yeah, about a dozen of the families stayed in Ukraine. Many of them were staying in destinations further west. But when I started this project in September, there was one family that was still living in the city of Kharkiv. Wow.

And that's Sofia Kuzmina. And I met her one day last September on a playground. And this playground sits between her family's apartment building and the kindergarten. So she lives essentially like around the corner. And she was the only kid on the playground. Let's listen to a little bit of that.

Sophia is confident and tall. She wears half her blonde hair in a knot at the top of her head. She bypasses the brightly colored wooden seesaw and the metal merry-go-round and heads for a row of bushes, where she begins to collect leaves and sticks.

The playground is no fun when you're all alone. And Kharkiv, with nightly shelling, is pretty empty. Her mom, Natalia, is watching on a nearby bench. Who do you think she's talking to? She's talking to herself, her mom says. During the war, Sofia's had to get used to playing on her own. Sofia hands her mom a pile of leaves. Thank you. Yum, yum, yum.

Natalia says despite the danger, she can't even imagine moving and living elsewhere. For Sofia, now in the first grade, school is all online, and it's completely different from her beloved kindergarten. Are the colors different? Yeah, I don't know the color of wools in school. Yeah, because you can't see them.

Natalia explains that before the invasion, Sofia was social, calm, a leader. And the war, it's really taken a toll on her. She's overly emotional, acting out, argumentative. And Natalia's been doing everything she can to shield her. They don't even talk about the war. Her job is to put Sofia to bed before the nightly attacks, so she sleeps through it.

And she'll lie if she has to. That explosion? Oh, that's just a car. That's construction. So, Alyssa, do you think Sophia understands where her friends have gone and why her life has changed the way it has?

So I think, yeah, I think she does. I think kids are far more in tune with what's happening than adults realize. The family did leave Kharkiv for a little bit right after the invasion for a country house. So she knows that there's a war and that her life has changed because of it. And Sofia's mom, Natalia, told me a couple times that they weren't able to, quote, hide her from an explosion and she got scared and she cried and

The child psychologist I've been talking to say that when children experience trauma, it's super important for caregivers to kind of acknowledge what kids are feeling and seeing and not to diminish it. So I want to end our conversation, though, by talking about a family who took a really different approach than Sophia's parents. It's that little boy from the kindergarten, Bodan. He's the one that took that video with his family as they were fleeing Kharkiv.

They're now far west in the city of Lviv, near the border with Poland. And Bodan's mom, Victoria...

She has really shared a lot with Bogdan. My children know everything, Victoria explains, as she sits on the couch with Bogdan, quizzing him. Who made you leave Kharkiv, she asks. Who made Ukrainians leave their home, she asks. Putin.

And what are we doing now? We are punching them in the teeth, Bogdan says.

They left Kharkiv in a panic last winter. Bogdan's dad stayed behind, assisting the military in their defense. The rest of the family is now living in a friend's apartment here in Lviv. They say it's the safest place to be still in Ukraine. Bogdan grew up in an instant, his mom says. We didn't have time for filtering things. He was anxious, started to regress, biting things, sucking things.

Unlike Sophia's mom, Victoria felt telling him everything, that might help him get some power, some control back. That's so interesting. Parents just try everything they can, right, to make it okay, even when it's not okay. But that idea of being super transparent and talking to their son about everything that was happening, did that give him some power and control back? Yeah.

Well, you know, sometimes it can be a little overwhelming for Bodan. I mean, he still gets scared. I revisited them over the winter and I was struck by the balance of kind of knowing, you know, Bodan is a really smart kid and he likes being a bit of a know-it-all. But also just being carefree and being a six-year-old. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's hard and it's sad that for Bodan and so many of his generation, they don't really get a choice, you know, in the fact that this is their identity. And that was really clear one day when we were driving with Bodan and his mom home from school. Let's listen.

An air raid siren goes off, and Bogdan leans forward in his car seat and asks his mom, Does that mean there are missiles above us? I don't think so, she tells him. But what if they can get us, he squeaks. Victoria reassures him it's okay. She often does this when he gets anxious or stressed. But she's also adamant that Bogdan doesn't forget what's happening in his country.

A few blocks from their apartment, we stop at the Lichakiv Cemetery. The family comes here frequently to honor those who have died in the war.

We walk along the rows of freshly dug graves, the mounds of dirt covered in ribbons with pictures and flowers, a slight dusting of snow lingering on the petals. "I want my son to see this," Victoria says, "to feel this sacrifice." With Bogdan in tow, they approach a family here, standing at the end of one of the grave sites. At their feet, a portrait of a young man in uniform. Victoria and Bogdan stand with the family for a moment.

Bogdan holds his mom's hand. He's quiet as we walk back to the car. His mom is in tears. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. It's a

She doesn't want to shield him from this pain, from this hate that she feels. Oh, man. So after all of this reporting that you've done over these many months and following these families and these kids, Alyssa, I don't know if what have you learned is the right question, but what conclusions could you draw about any of this? Well, I think...

There's no one way to navigate this. You know, that's my biggest takeaway of just talking with so many families is just like every decision, big and small, can be really hard. And just listening and being open and supportive to kids is so important. I mean, it's a story of one classroom, but I think it also kind of tells the story of millions of Ukrainian children, millions of children,

across time who have been affected by war, you know, disrupted, rebuilding, and the story of what happens next. Yeah. And the schools in Ukraine right now, they're still closed. Still closed. Alyssa, thank you so much for bringing us these stories, these voices. We so appreciate it. You bet. It was a pleasure to speak with you. Alyssa Nadwarny and the story of one kindergarten class in Ukraine.

This episode was produced by Audrey Nguyen and edited by Jenny Schmidt. The story of the Ukrainian kindergarten was edited by Steve Drummond, Nishant Daya, and produced by Lauren Magaki. Translation by Hanna Palomaryenko. The Sunday story got engineering support from Joby Tenseko. It's also produced by Justine Yan. Our supervising producer is Liana Simstrom, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.

I'm Rachel Martin. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.