When desperate and terrified Ukrainians flee the war’s front, this is the city that helps them mourn and heal

They never came back.

Were they captured and sent silently to Russia, as other men have been? Were they killed? Shabanova still does not know.

The family waited five days for them and then decided they had to take a risk of their own and try to get to safety.

They began to flee along roads littered by corpses and clouded by pillars of smoke. On the way, they were captured by Russians and deported to Russia, then rescued by the Red Cross via one of the biggest humanitarian convoys of the war.

But unlike some other refugees from cities overrun by the Russian invasion, Shabanova did not seek a new home outside Ukraine. She and many others ended up in a remarkable city that offers hope inside this war-battered country. It’s a former crossroads of empire in the southwestern corner of Ukraine that has built upon a history of openness to become a refuge for Ukraine’s own displaced people in their time of need.

The city is Chernivtsi. When Shabanova came here she was one of an estimated million displaced Ukrainians who arrived during the war’s early months. Many of them have left for other countries, but an estimated 60,000 remain.

In Chernivtsi, Shabanova has turned her own tragedy into compassion. She has become part of the city’s embrace of the displaced, working as director of a support centre for Mariupol refugees in the city’s downtown. The centre helps an estimated 1,000 other women and children who escaped the horrors of Mariupol avoid sinking into an oblivion of loss and despair.

In bright rooms inside Chernivtsi’s Habsburg-built city hall, Shabanova and her team offer clothes, food, medicine, and therapy. Those who work at the centre provide comfort by sharing grief — each of them has experienced the same sorts of trauma as the people they’re supporting.

“We cry with every new person from Mariupol who comes here and tells their stories,” Shabanova said. “We cry with everyone.”

On one recent afternoon at the centre, she could be seen ignoring the screams of air-raid sirens to whisper words of comfort to women waiting for boots to warm their snow-soaked feet. Few missiles reach this part of Ukraine, but the city is regularly darkened by rolling power blackouts caused by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. Sirens sound whenever Russian aircraft or missiles fly, and fear rises in those who have been struck before.

“More than 75 per cent of survivors (visiting the Chernivtsi centre) suffer from acute post-traumatic stress triggered by the horrors they endured,” said the on-site physician, Dr. Hanna Kalchenko.

That day, the staff was helping several teary-eyed women gather bags of food and household essentials. An elderly woman sobbed as she carried a large box of supplies into evening darkness outside. But she was not crying in pain. She said they were tears of gratitude, for the help of friends from a city that no longer exists except as ruins and as lovely paintings on the walls of the Mariupol centre.

“My people are here,” she said. “They understand me like family.”

Shabanova’s outreach to others is not unexpected here. The city has grown into its reputation as a tolerant, welcoming place through many other challenging times in its history. In past centuries, as an Ottoman and later Austro-Hungarian capital, it hosted Jewish, Turkish, Romanian and Ukrainian residents in relative harmony, and was affectionately nicknamed “Little Vienna” and “Jerusalem upon the Prut.”

Chernivtsi’s Austrian-led policy of religious tolerance and relaxation of feudal obligations drew many different ethnic groups from eastern Europe fleeing Polish and Ottoman oppression, said Mykahaila Chuchko, head of the department of history at Chernivtsi National University.

But when Chernivtsi was annexed by Romania 1918, then the Nazis in 1941 and the Soviets in 1944, its multicultural humanism became more nostalgia than reality. Over half of Chernivtsi’s Jewish population fell victim to antisemitism and Nazi death camps and thousands of Romanians were deported to Siberia. The city that in 1930 counted almost 40 per cent of its population as Jews, 27 per cent as Romanians and 14 per cent as Germans, was, by the census in 2001, an almost homogenous Ukrainian backwater of 240,000 inhabitants. By then just one in 20 residents was Romanian and fewer than one in 100 was Jewish.

Chernivtsi-raised poet Paul Celan described the city in sorrowful terms when accepting the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958. It was, he said, “A place where human beings and books used to live.”

But today the town’s large tree-lined square welcomes thousands of battle-weary human beings who find shelter among imposing Habsburg-styled buildings. A block-long Soviet-era wall of reinforced concrete has been reinvented as a Ukrainian-flag backdrop where every morning a ritual honours the country’s fallen soldiers.

The Jewish community is also rebuilding in Chernivtsi, said Josef Zissels, a human rights activist and World Jewish Congress vice-president. He visited the area recently while leading a therapy retreat in the nearby countryside for just-released female prisoners of war.

Zissels spent his childhood and youth in Chernivtsi and remembers childhood friends who spoke Russian, Yiddish, German, Polish and Ukrainian in the 1950s and 1960s. Jews escaping Soviet antisemitism elsewhere strengthened the town’s cultural and entrepreneurial vigour even during that time, he said.

“Chernivtsi has a special tolerance of faith,” he said. “And people today are doing what they can to bring victory to Ukraine.”

One afternoon another Mariupol refugee, Anastasia Vorontsova, who works as a city councillor for its municipal government in exile while her husband works at the front, picked up her 12-year-old daughter, Lisa, at school. The two of them had evacuated on the eve of the war.

Lisa came cheerfully out of the school, while other students just went downstairs, where they live. Like in many schools in Chernivtsi, classrooms had been converted into bunk bedrooms to accommodate 150 refugees from other parts of the country.

“I used to cry a lot,” Lisa said on the way to art class, describing how she felt when she was told that the family’s home in Mariupol had been destroyed. “I wish I could turn back time.”

Across town, at Chernivtsi’s City of Kindness shelter for victims of domestic abuse, director Maryna Martyschuk also welcomes mothers and children fleeing Russian occupation. Martyschuk, herself a victim of violence who took refuge at the facility four years ago, has tripled its capacity and built a bomb shelter since the war began.

Inside, on a snowy winter day, bubbly teenagers huddled over shared video games and a dozen orphan toddlers, who had been evacuated from Odesa, smiled and squirmed as they waited for a snack.

One of the teens, 14-year-old Denys Matsegora, had escaped Russian-occupied Slovyansk in July with his mother and two siblings. He said that he is anxious about his father (fighting on the front) and his dog (left behind under heavy shelling). But, sitting in a crowded room with his arms comforting a smaller child, he said he is grateful for new friends at the shelter.

“I am happy that my mother doesn’t cry as much now,” he said. “In Slovyansk, she was crying all the time.”

Downtown, daily hot meals offered by several charities nourish souls in need. One day near noon, beside a tent covering lines of steam trays, Ruslan Skydanyuk said he and other volunteers from the Chernivtsi Baptist Church have been serving thousands every day since the beginning of March.

Over a bowl of hot soup, Inessa Maslivets said her home in eastern Ukraine was bombed in March and her daughter’s leg was injured in the shelling. But now, she said, the girl has just started school in Chernivtsi.

“I am also taking courses to enhance my job skills,” she said, packing food to take to her mother.

The next morning, on the edge of town in a pristine ward at the local military hospital, Sasha, an injured soldier, lay in bed, recovering from eight months as a Russian prisoner in Kherson. The city had been captured then recovered by Ukraine when Russians retreated, and Sasha had been released. Sasha’s blank eyes, dry lips and pasty skin made him look like a corpse. But he only feels dead, he said.

Sasha was forbidden by the government to describe the horrors of Russian captivity because of fears that the Russians might respond to complaints by retaliating against Ukrainians who are still prisoners. Sasha stroked his left leg, crushed as thin as a cheap paperback.

The hospital’s director, Dr. Vasyl Rogatyuk, said that many former prisoners suffered extreme torture at the hands of the Russians. He gave no details, but Sasha’s face and injuries told their own stories.

“I am waiting for my friends in Chernivtsi to arrive,” he said, his eyes flickering with light. While Rogatyuk and his medical team live day and night at the hospital as they treat the wounded, volunteers bring Sasha and other recovering soldiers clothes and help them rebuild their lives.

At the Mariupol survivor centre, Iryna Shabanova put on a brave face as she comforted one of her co-workers, Katya Aksenko, who had been talking about the memories that haunt her — of daily shelling, of endless fear, and of bodies scattered like refuse in the streets of her Mariupol neighbourhood. Then Shabanova moved on to help another victim of war who now calls Chernivtsi home.

Shabanova holds out hope that her husband will eventually be one of Chernivtsi’s new residents. It has now been 11 months since he walked away from their shelter in Mariupol. She prays he was deported to Russia and not killed, and that someday he will walk along the welcoming streets of this city and come in through her door.

“I will wait for him here,” she said. “Until then, we are building our new family in Chernivtsi.”