I am all in a sea of wonders

Sofiia Hromakova was 15 years old when her father was killed while serving in the territorial defense of Ukraine. She learned of his death after moving from the now-occupied Mariupol to Poland via Zaporizhzhia. Her family ended up living in England, where Hromakova could return to her education.

“When I started at an English school, people would ask questions like, ‘You are here with your mother, where is your father?’ I would cry,” she said. “Most teenagers are thinking about their exams, not ‘oh, god, where is my father’s body?’”

Hromakova said that Children of Heroes, a Ukrainian charity, helped her rebuild her life after suffering such enormous trauma. “They helped us right at the start when we only had a couple of bags and needed clothes,” she said. “They helped me get back to school and pass my exams. They helped me paint and get back to doing hobbies. I felt like I was in a cage and they helped me get out.” She is now back in Ukraine and studying for a university degree.

Children of Heroes is currently registering around 15 children a day, said Yuliya Sotska, the charity’s head of communications. “Some of them want to tell their story and some don’t, but we collect stories from every family that joins the fund, with their consent, so that those stories exist and the world doesn’t get to forget them. One girl who lost her entire family, everyone except her dog, told me her story the way you’d read aloud from a book, completely flat, and that distance is sometimes what trauma sounds like in a child’s voice.”

Russia’s first modern invasion of Ukraine came in 2014, which means the foundation is already working with a second generation. “We have children whose parents joined the armed forces after losing their own parents in 2014, so the people who enlisted were once the children we exist for, and now, unfortunately, their children are,” Sotska said.

The Ridni Foundation, a charity that helps orphans find new homes, noted that as of March 2025, almost 26,000 children were living full-time in institutions across the country. “What tends to surprise people most is that only 18 percent of them, 4,568 children, are actually orphans or legally without parental care,” Mariana Romaniak, Ridni’s CEO, said. “Roughly four in five children in institutional care have at least one parent alive—they’re there because their family didn’t get the support it needed in time, not because they have no family at all.”

Ridni works with government bodies to reform the system and fix the problems behind this. “Together with the Lviv Regional Military Administration, we initiated the transformation of a former residential institution into the Lviv Regional Centre for Social Support of Children and Families,” Romaniak said. “Instead of long-term institutional care, children now receive temporary protection there while specialists work with their families to overcome the crisis and, whenever it’s safe, reunite them.”

Romaniak explained that some children withdraw and have behavioral problems. Others attach to particular adults and struggle when separated. And, in some cases, children who have lost everything they knew struggle to accept help. “It can look like defiance, but underneath there may simply be a question: ‘Can I trust you, and will you still be here tomorrow?’” she said.