The first air-raid siren went off in Chernivtsi on February 27th, four days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. By then, we had watched hours of nightmarish footage from Kyiv, Mariupol, and Kharkiv, yet Chernivtsi, in southwestern Ukraine, had remained untouched. The only noticeable difference was that, very soon after the fighting began, tens of thousands of refugees had started to make their way into the city. They were easily distinguishable from Chernivtsi residents, not just because of the slight difference in their accents but because some of their clothes looked more expensive than the knockoff brands that most people here find at Kalinka bazaar, and so did their cars, which added to the already congested traffic on our broken cobblestone streets.
It is difficult to convey what it’s like to hear an air-raid siren for the first time: no recording can prepare you to experience it in person. My husband, Dima, and I were getting ready for bed when it happened. The wail of the siren ripped into our ears and propelled us onto the floor. I engaged in a desperate wrestling match with our cat to get her into a carrier, while also trying to find my slippers, and then ran to the basement of our house. Close behind us were Dima’s parents, their dog, and his younger brother, along with his aunt and seven-year-old cousin, Marta, who had come to live with us because they were frightened in their apartment, which was close to a major transportation hub. We huddled together and trembled for more than an hour, until we received a notification on our phones that the threat had passed.
Every subsequent air-raid siren has brought with it the threat of a kind of violence that Chernivtsi has not seen since the Second World War. So far, we have been lucky, but many families here don’t want to risk waiting for that to change. Less than a week after joining us, Dima’s aunt and cousin decided to head to Poland. Like many able-bodied Ukrainians, Dima’s uncle is a migrant laborer and had been working there before the war started, so they already had a place to stay. We celebrated Marta’s seventh birthday a few days before their departure, endeavoring to make it as normal as possible. But the day began with an air-raid siren, and she threw a temper tantrum when her mother, who had promised to go home and pick up one of her dresses, ran back in fear. We tried to explain to Marta that it was dangerous, and she cried, “I know! I’m not stupid!,” before burying her tearstained face in her hands. Eventually, we managed to find her a cake, filled the kitchen with balloons, and wished her not only a happy birthday but a peaceful sky over her head. Then it was our turn to hide our tearstained faces.
Most Ukrainian men between the ages of eighteen and sixty are banned from leaving the country, in case they are called to fight. And so, when Dima’s aunt and cousin left, he and his stepfather tried to persuade my mother-in-law and me to take advantage of the opportunity and go with them. We both refused. My mother-in-law did not want to leave her two sons behind, and I, similarly, felt as if I would be abandoning my husband. The thought of carrying on some semblance of everyday life in Poland while they continued volunteer relief efforts in Chernivtsi and prepared themselves for the possibility of being drafted seemed wrong, even perverse. Dima and I argued in hushed voices well into the night. I reminded him that, although I hold an American passport, Ukraine has been my home for the past four years. Many Ukrainians I met assumed (correctly, for the most part) that I had it easy in Chernivtsi, so I had spent those years trying to prove myself. I’d studied Ukrainian and done my best to assimilate, and, in that time, it had become impossible to imagine being at home somewhere else. Dima and I have been together for three of those years, married for one. Our relationship dynamic has been shaped by the coronavirus pandemic, a cancer scare (mine), and, now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those three years feel like a lifetime—in the best sense—and have also bestowed upon me a confidence that we can get through anything together. When Dima finally understood that he couldn’t change my mind about leaving, he sighed. “So you will stay,” he said. “I suppose you’ve always had a taste for the extreme.” The next day, we ran into an acquaintance, another woman who had refused to leave. Dima proudly told her that his brave American wife had no intention of leaving either, and I understood that, although he was worried about me, he was also, on some level, relieved.
Before the invasion, Chernivtsi was home to an estimated two hundred and sixty thousand people. Twenty-five miles from Romania, it has the restless spirit of a border city—one where the tremors of history are felt deeply. Whereas nearby Lviv is often referred to as a chic European hot spot by tourists and locals, Chernivtsi’s brand is more kitsch. Many Chernivtsi residents regard the city’s years as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as its golden age, and businesses, especially restaurants and cafés, try to capitalize on that nostalgia.
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The historical region of Bukovyna, which includes Chernivtsi, was one of the most ethnically diverse provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In many parts of Bukovyna, Germans, Jews, Romanians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Poles, Armenians, and other ethnic groups are said to have lived together in relative harmony until the collapse of the empire and the horrors wrought by the Second World War. Today, Chernivtsi is regarded as one of the most tolerant cities in the country. (My husband’s family is a testament to this history. His heritage is not only Ukrainian but also Romanian, Hungarian, and Polish. In lighter times, I would joke with him that he is a true son of Franz Joseph.) When the Soviets joined Chernivtsi to “greater Ukraine” (seizing it from Romania), during the Second World War, they tried to erase this diversity by forcing populations to migrate. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the city staged numerous literary events in order to put itself back on the cultural map of Europe, but post-independence Chernivtsi has struggled with political strife, deeply rooted corruption, failing public infrastructure, and an inability to preserve many of the architectural wonders of the Austro-Hungarian era.
I first came to Chernivtsi as a volunteer English teacher for GoGlobal, the organization inspired by the Ukrainian Afghan journalist Mustafa Nayyem’s call for foreign-language-learning among Ukrainian youth. It was my first visit to the country. My previous life might have seemed perfect to some: I’m a Ph.D. student in French literature at New York University, I travelled to Paris regularly, and I taught French and English on the side to models, business executives, and other high-profile people. But it wasn’t for me, and I wanted a taste of something different. As it turned out, Ukraine was the answer.
That summer, I met several local writers in Chernivtsi, including the poet Khrystia Vengryniuk, and got involved in the Ukrainian literary scene. There was something deeply exciting about contemporary Ukrainian literature, and it felt as if I was witnessing history being written in real time. In 2017, I co-founded Apofenie, an online literary magazine, and published Ukrainian, Western European, and American authors, alongside interviews with them. With the Russian invasion, many of those Ukrainian writers have enlisted in the Army, joined the Territorial Defense Forces, or devoted themselves full-time to volunteer aid efforts.
According to local officials, about fifty thousand refugees from throughout Ukraine have relocated to this formerly quiet city. Most private housing was quickly snatched up by those who arrived in the first days of the war, and some landlords, seeing a business opportunity, have dramatically increased rents. Even worse, I have heard of at least one case in which people used the popular online marketplace OLX to promise housing, only to disappear after receiving money from a desperate person. Still, community centers, the university, and other large venues have done their best to house refugees, and the new owners of the city’s Cheremosh Hotel, a three-hundred-plus-room relic of the Soviet era that has lain dormant for fifteen years, fast-tracked renovations so that they could start taking in refugees. Volunteer efforts to gather clothes, medicine, and food have come together with incredible speed. Housewives are rallying their friends to cook meals for those in need, and at least one private health clinic is offering free services to those fleeing the fighting. Meanwhile, many Chernivtsi residents have welcomed not only friends and acquaintances but total strangers into their homes. The astonishing solidarity among Ukrainians, not only in Chernivtsi but throughout the country, will define this crisis for the long term.
My husband and I moved in with my in-laws and made room in our own apartment for Zhenya and Lena, a couple who fled Kharkiv with their six-year-old son, Gleb. Zhenya and Lena are in their thirties, and they work for MobiDev, an American I.T. company that had offices throughout Ukraine. The Kharkiv office’s management team began to call its employees on the morning of the invasion, telling them to head to the Chernivtsi office if they could. As it turned out, the son of Dima’s grandfather’s neighbor worked for the same company, and the H.R. team was asking employees in Chernivtsi to help find places for about forty of their colleagues. We didn’t know Zhenya and Lena personally, but we agreed to take them in.
The drive from Kharkiv to Chernivtsi usually takes a little more than thirteen hours, but it took Zhenya and Lena more than thirty hours to arrive. Although the sound of shelling faded as they left Kharkiv, the long lines of cars stretching westward served as a reminder of the horrors that they were trying to escape, as did the military vehicles speeding in the opposite direction. Only after they had made it about halfway to Chernivtsi did Zhenya allow himself to pull over into a gas-station parking lot to sleep for an hour. “When you’re motivated to keep your family alive, your body functions differently,” Zhenya recalled. “It forgets how to count time.” The traffic became even more intense as they reached Kamianets-Podilskyi, a medieval city about fifty miles up the highway from Chernivtsi: it took them nearly eight hours to move fewer than ten miles.
Their child, Zhenya said, was the primary reason for leaving Kharkiv: “I didn’t want my son to have to sit in a cold basement and hear the sounds of war firsthand. That would have scarred him for life.” He added, “The main thing for now is that he understands war in the theoretical sense, and not literally.”
It was Zhenya and Lena’s first visit to Chernivtsi; they had previously visited only the more tourist-friendly areas in western Ukraine, like Lviv and Yaremche. Now they are trying to take the time to get to know the city; Lena and her son go for daily walks and explore their new surroundings. Several of Zhenya and Lena’s colleagues fled Ukraine entirely, but the couple decided to stay for as long as they could. “It’s very important for us to get back home to Kharkiv,” Zhenya said. “Our whole life is still there.” Their deep ties to their native land are built both of love and of bitter defiance. Staying in the country is a way to tell the Russians, “You do not frighten us. You will not win.”
Anastasiia Savchenko also came to Chernivtsi with the safety of her child—nine-year-old Sofia—in mind. Anastasiia had previously lived in Troieshchyna, a large residential district on the outskirts of Kyiv’s left bank. On the second night of the invasion, Russia bombed a power station close to their home, and the explosion illuminated the sky. Anastasiia and Sofia then spent their nights in the neighborhood bomb shelter. After nine days of constant air-raid sirens and shelling, they managed to leave, heading to a friend’s home in Chernivtsi. Sofia had become increasingly distraught, and would beg her mother to go back to the bomb shelter even during moments of relative calm.
The journey from Kyiv to Chernivtsi by car, which is usually seven or eight hours, took Anastasiia and Sofia three days. They stopped rarely along the way, to fill up the car’s tank, go to the bathroom, and sleep; on one occasion, they had to wait six hours in line for roughly five gallons of oil. For much of the trip, Anastasiia feared that she would never escape the sounds of explosions and air-raid sirens. Now she spends her days caring for Sofia and her friend’s young child, while working remotely for an I.T. company. Later in the day, after Sofia’s online lessons conclude, Anastasiia sometimes takes the children outside, or to a film screening organized by volunteers. Even though she is grateful for her friend’s help, she wants to find housing of her own in Chernivtsi. “It’s impossible,” she lamented. “There are too many refugees here.”
Some refugees in Chernivtsi have no home to return to. The Ukrainian author Oleksandr Mykhed and his wife, Olena, lived in Hostomel, a town northwest of Kyiv. They came to Chernivtsi after the Russians attacked Kyiv, because Oleksandr’s mother was born here and they know many people. A week after Oleksandr and Olena left Hostomel, a neighbor sent them a photo showing that the couple’s town house had been destroyed. They allowed themselves to feel anger but refused to cry; like many refugees in Chernivtsi I’ve spoken to, they prefer to channel their energy into volunteer efforts. They’re saving a full outpouring of emotions for the day that the Ukrainian Army declares victory. “Besides,” Oleksandr added, “the entire country is our home.”
It is surreal to visit Zhenya and Lena in what was once our apartment. Our former neighbors pass us wordlessly in the corridors of the building as if they have already forgotten our faces. Only the street cats that we used to feed rush to greet us, delighted yet indignant that it took so long for us to return. Zhenya ushers us into the living room, and Lena brings us coffee in cups that I bought when Dima and I moved in together, a time that feels like another person’s life entirely. As we prepare to leave, our new friends from Kharkiv reassure us that we may stop by anytime we like—in fact, they encourage us to do so more often. They don’t really know anyone else in Chernivtsi. And it goes without saying that this tragedy has joined us together for a lifetime.
A lot of our belongings are still in the apartment, including my library, which I was once so proud of. Every time I go back to take something, I can’t help but wonder: Do I really need this? If I didn’t take it with me the first time, then why now? What if the Russians come to Chernivtsi tomorrow and I have to run for my life? Is that book of Paul Celan’s poetry going to save me from getting raped or murdered?
The answer to all these questions is obvious. There is no going back to what we once thought was normal. None of us will look at our lives in the same way again.