Pushing past grief and fear, two Ukrainian teachers turned their school into a refuge

Svitlana Mukhina's husband used to leave candies for their granddaughters under a toy dwarf at their home near Kyiv. 

He's gone now — killed in action last October in the early stages of Russia's bloody campaign to conquer Bakhmut. 

But the candies still appear for the girls routinely, as though Viktor was still alive. Mukhina's granddaughters know he is gone, but the treats keep his memory vital for all of them.

"It still hurts a lot," she said in a recent interview with CBC News.

The death of her husband was a personal breaking point, said Mukhina.

Her granddaughters, five and seven years old, have their own rituals. Believing that her grandfather is watching from "the sky," the eldest child reads her alphabet aloud, sitting near a window so he can hear. He had promised to buy her a tablet when she learned to read.

Mukhina, 56 — a teacher with brown hair, a strong face and (occasionally) a stern look — works at a primary school among people who also understand loss. Her principal is from Crimea and was forced to flee after Russia annexed the peninsula nine years ago.

Olha Tymoshenko, 63 — blonde and blessed with a generally sunny disposition — is in many ways completely unlike her friend Mukhina. But a shadow creeps across her face when she talks about fleeing her home and her previous life.

Both women call Kyiv School No. 309 home. The school sits in the Pozniaky district, a residential suburb of the capital.

During last year's Russian advance on the Ukrainian capital, the school became a well-known haven for hundreds of people fleeing the bombardment over several months.

The credit belongs to Tymoshenko, who insisted on preparing for what she saw as the inevitable.

At the height of Russia's push on Kyiv last spring, the school sheltered over 500 people — mostly women and children.

The lives of both Tymoshenko and Mukhina were thrown together before the war, but they remained intertwined by their individual losses and their shared experience in the school's basement shelter.

They had never told those stories, or the story behind the shelter, until they sat down with CBC News in Kyiv just recently.