For a while now, I've stopped when I see portraits of smiling people on Facebook.

It's enough to see a Ukrainian name next to it to fear that these people are no longer alive.

Celebrated, fallen.

I see these two smiling faces, mother and daughter, on a friend's Facebook page.

They captivate me immediately, pulling me out of a hole like they're adjusting something.

Then I examine images of a rocket hitting an intersection in central Kyiv.

The hole in the ground disappears the next day, is covered with fresh asphalt and is given the name "Black Square".

I roam through photos of destruction and battles, of liberated places, of houses with shot-up interiors and people who are defenseless at the mercy of violence.

As if they were surrounded by love

This mother and daughter are from liberated Izyum, wearing elegant cloaks.

An artist family?

I'm flipping through the photos of a charity - and somehow these two don't fit in at all with the dejected, poor people who pick up groceries or rummage through piles of warm things.

And even less to the surrounding area with its destroyed schools, the hospital without electricity and, yes, the mass grave.

But they are from there and seem so happy, as if they were always surrounded by love and warmth.

They spent the months of the occupation in their house, barely leaving the basement and just getting some food.

I wondered how this photo came about and who they are.

The photo tells something of the spontaneous, self-forming and sovereign volunteer movement in Ukraine that has also reached these people.

The photographer, Alex, is my acquaintance - literary events are actually his profession.

Now he's going through the war.

He volunteered for the "Territorial Defence", called me in the first few days with alarming reports about the terror of the Russian army in Chernobyl and at dams.

When I asked him about this photo, he told me to contact his friend Claudia, whom he had followed to Izyum.

She went to Izyum to help with her war experience

I called Claudia and was amazed: She is a former student of my mother.

In the first days she was under occupation in Irpin, and then she fled to Kyiv with her family.

When she returned to Irpin weeks later, her house was unharmed, but sheer destruction reigned around it.

So she started distributing clothes and food with a local organization.

When Izyum was liberated a few weeks ago, she saw "the same pictures as here again" and after a few days a whole caravan of neighbors from Irpin drove there, organized by her.

It was a matter of course for them: These people had experienced similar things and went to Izyum to help with their war experience.

I asked her what she did before the war and she said "kids".

She has five.

Claudia also didn't know anything specific about the mother and daughter and told me about Toma, whom she had once met on a playground in Kyiv.

Toma read Claudia's appeal on Facebook and joined her.

She also told me: "I saw these pictures from Izyum and wanted to go there." Toma works in a therapeutic center for children with special needs and has been taking care of internally displaced persons, widows and traumatized children since 2014.

It was she who "discovered" this family: one day an old woman received groceries from her and asked for cereal for her granddaughter, who sits at home and never goes outside.

Never.

Toma went there immediately and found a small, well maintained house with solar panels.

Everyone was dainty and affectionate: the mother, the father and Wlada, the girl.

Before the war, the mother earned her money in a call center selling sushi.

During several months of the occupation, only the grandmother went outside on errands, everyone else was afraid of air raids and Kadyrov's Chechen units.

Wlada, ten years old, had been in the basement for so long that she no longer dared to leave the house.

Toma saw Wlada's colorful fingernails first, asked her about paint and colors.

And then she saw Vlada's pictures.

Soon they were all drinking tea together and talking about air raids, about a bomb that fell in the well, and then about painting, because Vlada's painting is the focus of family life.

She even won a competition before the war with a winter landscape.

Then the girl went outside into the autumn.

And Alex photographed her with her mother and they were beaming.

But the war is not over for any of them.