After Mariupol: Learning to Live Again

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 21 October 2026

This is a continuation of a recent Lviv Herald interview with a woman who escaped with her family from Mariupol during the Russian siege of the city in 2022. In the first interview, she described life under bombardment, the collapse of the ordinary structures of civilisation and her family’s eventual escape through Russian-controlled territory towards Zaporizhzhia. In this second part, Matthew Parish asks what happened after they reached safety: about displacement, exile, her children’s lives, and whether it is possible to recover a sense of home after the place you called home has been destroyed and occupied.

As in the original article, the interviewee remains anonymous for reasons of privacy and security. The interview was conducted in Russian and translated into English for publication. The translation has been lightly edited for clarity and readability without changing the substance of the interviewee’s answers.

Matthew Parish: When did you first feel that you and your family were genuinely safe? What do you remember about arriving in Zaporizhzhia?

Interviewee: The first time I felt safe was when we arrived in Zaporizhzhia. At the entrance to the city, in an Epicentr store building, there was a reception centre for refugees. We had arrived practically straight from the line separating Ukrainian-controlled territory from the so-called DPR, and volunteers met us immediately.

They registered our details and asked what we needed: whether anybody required medical attention and what clothes or other things our family needed. They examined us, and my mother-in-law finally received the insulin she so desperately needed.

At that point we still did not know that she had broken her arm. We thought it was simply badly bruised. In the end she went for two and a half weeks without a cast. Even in Zaporizhzhia they could not immediately arrange an X-ray, so for a while we still did not know whether it was actually fractured.

They gave us hot food, clothes and everything else we needed. There were children’s toys, pushchairs, hygiene products and all the ordinary little things of everyday life. We even took toothbrushes. Ours had needed replacing for a long time, and in those circumstances something as simple as a new toothbrush seemed enormously important. They found food for our dog as well.

After everything we had experienced, it was astonishing and deeply moving to see complete strangers looking after us and trying to help everyone.

But that was also when the hysteria came.

Until then we had been permanently in survival mode. We had to think about where to go, how to save the children and our relatives, where to find food, water and medicine. Once I could finally relax a little, the reality of what had happened truly reached me.

I suddenly felt terribly sorry for myself. For the first time, I acutely felt that I was a refugee: a person who no longer had a home. It was very difficult to understand that other people now pitied me, helped me and gave me the most basic things I needed. I had never imagined that I could find myself in such a situation.

Perhaps that was the first moment when I allowed myself to feel all the pain of what had happened. I understood how serious everything was, and that the previous life we had spent years building was behind us. Until then I had simply been trying to survive and save my family. It was only in Zaporizhzhia that I could begin to understand what we had lost.

Matthew Parish: What happened after Zaporizhzhia? How did your family eventually come to live in the Netherlands?

Interviewee: After Zaporizhzhia we went to Dnipro, where we lived for about two weeks. We needed to complete our treatment and obtain the medical care we required.

My husband had suffered a mild concussion, and he spent two weeks in hospital receiving intravenous treatment. My mother-in-law finally had her arm put in a cast and received the medicines she needed. My younger son also underwent an operation on his ear. There was a large growth inside it and we did not completely understand what it was. Thank God, everything turned out well.

In Dnipro we lived in an apartment provided to us by a volunteer. He simply opened his sister’s apartment to us because she was away at the time. When she returned, we still needed to finish our medical treatment, and they allowed us to remain there.

I am still tremendously grateful to those people. Again and again during our journey, we encountered people who simply refused to abandon us when we were in trouble.

After that we moved to Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, which seemed safer. Volunteers

received us there as well. They provided accommodation for a symbolic rent, helped us with clothes and shoes and supported us emotionally.

We found jobs and started working. But salaries were low, and it was very difficult to support our family, pay for accommodation and provide the children with everything they needed.

After about six months, we realised that we needed to look for possibilities abroad. We spent a long time deciding which country to choose, and eventually decided to go to the Netherlands, where a friend of ours was already living with her family. They had been there for about six months. They told us it was possible to find work, that many people understood English and that local people were friendly towards Ukrainians.

We hoped we could begin a new life, work and support our family ourselves.

Five of us arrived in the Netherlands: my husband and me, our two sons and my husband’s mother. And, of course, our dog came with us.

Initially we were placed in a reception centre, where we spent about nine days waiting for accommodation suitable for our family. Then we were given small residential containers with a kitchen and toilet. There was one room inside, which became a shared bedroom for the entire family.

Of course it was nothing like the home we had been accustomed to, but we understood that we had to begin with what was available and gradually move forward.

The most difficult thing at the beginning of our new life was finding work. We did not want to live on benefits, sit at home and wait for assistance. We wanted to work, support ourselves and our children and feel like independent people again.

But finding employment without speaking Dutch, and with only very limited English, was not easy. We had an enormous desire to work, but we encountered the language barrier and the reality of having to begin almost entirely from zero in a completely unfamiliar country.

Matthew Parish: Your sons were 15 and 17 when the full-scale invasion began, so they were old enough to understand what was happening around them. How do they remember Mariupol, and how have their lives developed since you arrived in the Netherlands?

Interviewee: Of course my sons remember the events of 2022. They understood everything and experienced much of it alongside us.

We try not to return to the most difficult memories, although sometimes the subject arises, particularly when we meet somebody from our home city here in the Netherlands. More often, however, we remember not the war and destruction but our lives before it: the places where we loved to walk, memorable events and the festivals for which Mariupol was known far beyond the city.

We want to preserve not merely the memory of what we lost, but everything good that we had.

The children adapted quite well to life in the Netherlands. My younger son went to school here and learned Dutch very quickly. Both sons already spoke English well, so communicating and finding common ground with people was easier for them.

Later we moved to another town, and my younger son began working when he was 16. Initially he worked part-time on a farm after school. At the same time, he was studying remotely in Ukraine to become a chef.

When the farmer discovered this, he recommended my son to a restaurant, where he was taken on as an assistant chef. He worked there for about six months and then moved to Amsterdam with his older brother. They rented an apartment themselves and began building their own lives.

Faith has played an important role in my sons’ lives. While we were living in Ivano-Frankivsk, they began attending a Protestant Pentecostal church. They found answers there to many of the questions troubling them, and my older son was baptised.

After moving to the Netherlands, he found a church belonging to the same international Oxygen network that they had joined in Ukraine.

Eventually my older son became one of the people who initiated the establishment of an Oxygen church in the Netherlands. Together with a team of like-minded people, they rented premises in a church in Amsterdam and began holding services for Ukrainians.

My younger son is also part of the team and actively participates in the life of the congregation. This September the Amsterdam church celebrated its second anniversary. Services are conducted in Ukrainian. Every week there is a prayer for Ukraine, there are sermons, and people gather to talk, pray and support one another.

A year after the Amsterdam church opened, another Oxygen congregation was established in Hoogeveen.

For us this is particularly joyful. Our children have not merely found their own place in a new country; they are helping other Ukrainians find spiritual support, companionship and a sense of unity far from home.

My younger son continued developing professionally as well. After working in one restaurant, he obtained a job in another restaurant where he had wanted to work for a long time. A few months later, the restaurant received a Michelin star, and my son spent about a year working as a chef at that level. His contract ended very recently and he is now looking for another job.

The young people from the church team also organise summer camps for Ukrainian children every year. They arrange activities, help the children spend their time enjoyably and usefully, and share the Word of God with them.

That is very important to us. Even far from home, our children are trying to help other Ukrainians and do something good for people who have also been forced to leave their country.

And perhaps the happiest thing for us as parents is that both our sons found girls they love and married this year.

They are now building families of their own, each following his own path and learning to make his own decisions. We are extremely proud of them. Despite everything they had to experience at such a young age, they did not lose their desire to live, develop themselves, help other people and build their futures.

I think our children, like us, try to look forward more than they look backwards.

But Mariupol will always remain part of their lives, part of their childhood and part of our shared history.

Matthew Parish: Has what happened changed you personally? Do you think differently now about money, happiness, planning and the future?

Interviewee: Yes, of course. I think that after everything I have experienced, a great deal about me has changed — some things for the better and some, perhaps, for the worse. But what has changed most is my attitude towards life, money, the future and what actually matters.

I am very happy that my children’s lives are going well, that they have found people they love and are now building families of their own. For me as a mother, that is an enormous happiness.

I have always loved travelling. For me the important thing was never money but emotions, experiences, the opportunity to see something new and to share those moments with people close to me. The war convinced me once again that happiness really is not about money.

The most precious thing is having your loved ones beside you: being alive and healthy, being able to embrace one another, enjoy things together, discover new places and create good memories. It is important not merely to experience positive emotions yourself but to give them to other people.

So now I try to travel more, discover new countries, explore the world and, whenever possible, do these things with my family. I want to help my children develop, support them, look for new opportunities and simply spend more time together.

Back in Mariupol, I had plans stretching ten years into the future: our business, the children’s education and everything else about our lives. I was accustomed to planning, thinking ahead and being confident that everything would continue along the path we had chosen.

Life showed me how completely everything can change in a single day.

Now I do not make plans so far ahead. Of course I have wishes, objectives and dreams, but I have learned to value today more. I want to live here and now, appreciate what I have, not postpone life until later and not wait for some special moment before allowing myself to be happy.

Perhaps the principal thing these events have taught me is that we cannot control everything that happens to us, but we can choose how we live each day.

And while we have life, people we love and the opportunity to keep moving forward, we should value these things and try to be happy.

Matthew Parish: After losing your home in Mariupol and living in so many different places since then, what does the word “home” mean to you now? Do you still hope that one day you might return to Ukraine?

Interviewee: For me now, home is first and foremost the place where my family and the people I love are beside me.

It does not matter whether the house is large or small, what furniture it contains or what possessions are inside it. The important thing is to have the essentials: electricity, water, gas and a roof over your head so the rain does not fall on you. And if there is internet as well, that is wonderful.

But the most important thing is that my family is there.

For me, home is where the people I love are.

Of course I would very much like to return to Ukraine. But I would want to return specifically to my own city — Mariupol, which I loved very much and continue to love.

It is my city. It is my familiar life, my memories and all those places connected with so many years of my life.

But Mariupol is occupied now, and I understand that returning remains a very uncertain prospect. I do not know whether I will ever be able to live there again as I once did.

I considered other Ukrainian cities. For example, I liked Ivano-Frankivsk very much when we lived there after the beginning of the war. We were welcomed warmly, people helped us and we met wonderful people.

But despite all that, I never completely felt at home there. I was comfortable there, but it was still somebody else’s city.

Perhaps what I have understood after everything we have experienced is that you can become accustomed to a new place. You can find work, establish a household and meet good people.

But the feeling of home is something more.

For me it is connected both with my family and with the place where I spent most of my life, where my memories remain and where a part of my soul remains.

I do not know what our future will look like or where we will eventually live.

But if one day it becomes possible to return to my native Mariupol and live there peacefully, I would very much like to do so.

The first part of this interview was a story about survival. This second part is, perhaps, about something more difficult to define: what comes after survival.

There is a peculiar cruelty in the moment at which a person escaping war finally becomes safe. Danger has supplied its own discipline. There are children to protect, checkpoints to negotiate, medicine to find and decisions to make. Fear can be postponed because there is simply no time for it.

Then one arrives in Zaporizhzhia and a stranger hands you a toothbrush.

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It is an insignificant object under ordinary circumstances. Yet for this family it marked the restoration of ordinary civilisation: hot food, medicine, clean clothes, dog food, children’s toys and people asking what they could do to help. And it was precisely there, surrounded by kindness rather than violence, that the interviewee finally understood what had happened to her.

She had become a refugee.

Four and a half years later, the word seems inadequate. Her sons have learned new languages, worked, established independent lives, helped create a Ukrainian church community, organised activities for displaced Ukrainian children and married. One became a chef in a restaurant that subsequently received a Michelin star. Their parents, meanwhile, have learned the strange adult discipline of beginning again after discovering that the assumptions upon which their former lives rested could disappear in a matter of days.

Yet beneath everything remains Mariupol.

Not merely the Mariupol familiar from photographs of pulverised apartment blocks, but another Mariupol: a city of festivals and walks, businesses and schools, friends and family, ordinary domestic routines and plans stretching ten years into a future that never arrived.

That city survives principally in memory now.

Perhaps this explains the apparent contradiction at the heart of the interviewee’s definition of home. Home is wherever her family is. Yet home is also Mariupol. Ivano-Frankivsk could be welcoming, the Netherlands could offer safety and opportunity, and Amsterdam could become the place where her sons established adult lives of their own. None of these facts requires her to cease loving the city from which she escaped.

War creates millions of contradictions of this sort. A person can build a new life without repudiating the old one. Children can remember bombardment while falling in love and getting married. Someone can accept that the future cannot be controlled while remaining determined to have one.

In Mariupol, she planned ten years ahead.

Today, she tells us, she has learned to value the day in front of her.

After everything her family has survived, that does not sound like an abandonment of the future.

It sounds like a different way of possessing it.