When Olena Danylenko saw the unsmiling older woman approaching her outside the Lviv shelter where she now lives, her thoughts filled with the stories she’d heard of Ukrainians tiring of refugees.

“I feared she might say, ‘Why are you here disturbing my peaceful neighborhood?’” says Ms. Danylenko, who in May left her home in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region – two daughters, a granddaughter, and a dog in tow – after a bomb blast left her with three broken ribs.

Instead, the woman said she knew that families displaced by the war lived in the building, and she invited Ms. Danylenko to her nearby home to see if anything among her possessions could be of use.

“I was so grateful,” she says. “What I have found is that the citizens of this city are very supportive of us” – meaning, she explains, of her fellow Ukrainians who have been uprooted and most affected by the grinding war.

As Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its seventh month, and with the government focused on fighting what has become a war of attrition, the country is finding its ability to feed, house, educate, and find employment for millions of Ukrainian internally displaced persons (IDPs) under tremendous stress.

To the rescue have come large numbers of private citizens who find themselves in less threatening and even quite normal living conditions, yet feel compelled to do something to ease the challenges of less fortunate people.

“We are all affected by this war, but for me it’s about solidarity with others who are facing the deepest hardships,” says Tetiana Mochevynska, administrator of the Lviv Feminist Workshop’s shelter where Ms. Danylenko and her family live.

A university student in this relatively unscathed city, Ms. Mochevynska says the knowledge that millions of her fellow Ukrainians – primarily women and children – were homeless, jobless, and torn from schools and familiar surroundings has made it impossible for her to “carry on as if life was normal.”

The United Nations estimates that more than 10 million Ukrainians of a prewar population of 44 million have been forced from their homes, mostly from the east where the fighting is most intense. UNICEF estimates that as many as 5 million are children.

And while several million have fled to neighboring European countries and beyond, an estimated 7 million – like Ms. Danylenko – have chosen to remain in Ukraine, often seeking refuge in the relatively safe western part of the country.

If anything, the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration estimated last week, the number of IDPs is growing.

Government advice: Seek safety

Two recent factors that are adding to their ranks: Thousands of refugees who fled Ukraine early in the war are opting to return, but not necessarily to the homes they left; and the government continues to advise residents of the hottest battle zones to leave for safer areas.

On July 31 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used a televised address to order civilians still living in the eastern Donetsk region to evacuate. “The more people leave Donetsk region now, the fewer people the Russian army will have time to kill,” he said.

More recently, the government advised citizens living in Ukraine-controlled areas of the Kherson region to seek safety, in anticipation of the counteroffensive launched late last month against Russian occupying forces.

On Sept. 7, Ukraine called for the residents of Russian-occupied areas around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to evacuate for their own safety.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Maria Kuldrinska, a Mykolaiv family doctor, runs Niko Volunteers with a volunteer staff of 15, distributing food and household goods, mostly donated from Europe.

With public services overwhelmed, Ukrainians like Ms. Mochevynska have stepped up.

“When you see so many families in difficulty, you want to try to be helpful where you can,” says Ms. Mochevynska, a political science major at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University. She started volunteering at the Feminist Workshop in March, and when the shelter was created in June, she was named its administrator.

How can Ukrainians help each other, she adds, “if I don’t do what I can?”

By helping others, she helps herself

This wartime compassion is evident across Ukraine.

In Mykolaiv, a southern port much closer to the front lines, Maria Kuldrinska says she was motivated to help by a sense of duty – and her own personal tragedy.

“This war shows us that there are no east or west Ukrainian people. We are all Ukrainians paying a price for our country,” she says.

A family doctor who lost her soldier husband in the early intense fighting for her city, she says it was perhaps those two factors that drove her need to assist those most disrupted by the war.

She now helps run a community pantry organized by Niko Volunteers, a Mykolaiv charitable organization. It’s an activity she says helps others, but which she has found has been of great assistance to her as well.

“I realized that by volunteering my brain stopped thinking about my own pain,” she says, surrounded by the packages of diapers and other household necessities the pantry hands out. “I am too busy for that when I am thinking about everybody else.”

Volunteers like Ms. Mochevynska and Dr. Kuldrinska acknowledge that all the private initiatives that have sprung up, when combined with the government’s efforts, have been unable to meet the substantial needs of IDPs.

The government provides displaced families with a monthly stipend of about $100, but officials recognize that is insufficient for both food and a place to live. Last month Vitaly Muzychenko, the deputy minister of social policy for Ukraine, told journalists the government was not prepared “for such a scale of displaced persons.”

A human face

Most Ukrainians are aware of the staggering numbers of IDPs, but occasionally a story dominates the media that puts a human face on the war’s toll.

In July, the country learned of the tragic end of Anna Protsenko, a young woman who had followed government orders and evacuated her village, Pokrovsk, in Donetsk. The train that carried her westward was free, but soon what little money she had ran out and she was unable to find work. Feeling defeated, her family recounted, she moved back home. Just two days later, a Russian rocket killed her.

Such stories sadden Dr. Kuldrinska, but she says they also stiffen her resolve to keep serving her fellow Ukrainians. And especially, she adds, when she senses that some Ukrainians are losing their early fervor to help others and focusing more on their own lives.

Citing what she describes as “something like a domestic version” of donor fatigue, she notes that the regular volunteers at her pantry have dwindled from more than 100 when Mykolaiv was under intense attack to a core group of about 15 today.

Yet even as some Ukrainians may be tiring of their fellow citizens’ overwhelming needs, others report something very different – a war-forged solidarity and a newfound enthusiasm for addressing in innovative ways national needs laid bare by the war, such as in education and housing.

“What this war has shown us is that if we will not support each other, then we could not exist,” says Phillip Solodovnichenko, an educator working with the Odesa nonprofit Prozori to improve online education.

The group’s immediate task is to help the government educate all of the country’s children despite the war, he says. In the short term, his focus is on bringing online English classes and environmental studies to more students.

At the same time, he adds, Ukraine needs to use the shake-up in thinking the war has caused to build a better education system responding to today’s needs.

“Many of us now see that we need to do things in new ways,” Mr. Solodovnichenko says. “We can become a better country out of this,” he adds, “but we realize that if we don’t change, this war will have had no meaning.”

Rethinking the meaning of “home”

That thinking finds an echo in Marta Buriak, an urban planner in Lviv. The Rubber City nonprofit group she directs is using the challenge of housing displaced families as a way of developing innovative housing options for the country more broadly.

“We have this immediate need to house the growing population of IDPs, but in Ukraine we also need to change how people think about ‘home,’” she says.

Noting that for most Ukrainians “home” is something owned, not rented, and is meant for one family and not the kind of communal habitat Rubber City aims to develop, she says a change in thinking can start with the IDPs.

“The main question we are asking is how to make a home – not a shelter, but a home – for families from different parts of our country,” says Ms. Buriak, referring to the pilot project her group is developing in a building on Lviv’s outskirts.

“Home is more than four walls and a place for sleeping, it is really about people building a sense of community together,” she says. For IDPs that means “finding common language with people in a new city,” she says.

The first step may indeed be answering a specific need of the war’s displaced people. “But if we can develop new ways of thinking about what ‘home’ is,” she adds, “that will be something good for all Ukraine.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.

It was hardly a surprise. Yet it was still a shock, and not just because the benign presence of Queen Elizabeth II has been a steadying constant in British life over the past seven decades.

Amid all the public and private shows of grief since her passing last Thursday, it’s becoming clear that, for millions of Britons, Elizabeth II’s reign supplied an answer to a question that’s vexing countries beyond their own divided and economically troubled nation. It is tugging at the fabric of many other countries, too, including the United States.

We know what divides us. But what holds us together?

By far the most important, and daunting, challenge facing her son and heir, the new King Charles III, will be to exert this unifying influence himself.

The institution he heads – Britain’s constitutional monarchy – is a 21^st century anachronism. Many younger people feel that passing on the role of head of state as if it were a family heirloom, even if shorn of day-to-day political power, jars with the values they hold and the lives they lead.

Ben Stansall/AP

King Charles III attends a meeting Sept.12 of both houses of Parliament at Westminster Hall to express condolences following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The queen, Britain's longest-reigning monarch and a rock of stability across much of a turbulent century, died Sept. 8, 2022, after 70 years on the throne.

For many countries in the post-colonial Commonwealth of Nations, the monarchy is also associated with a British empire that exploited their resources, nullified any prospect of independence, and benefited from the slave trade.

Yet under Elizabeth, the Commonwealth thrived. At home, even among the young, calls for the abolition of the monarchy were confined to a fringe, far outweighed by those who continued to view it as a valued and essential part of what Britain is, and what being British means.

Part of this was down simply to Elizabeth’s longevity. The arc of her life reached from empire, through the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to the more recent decades in which Britain became a far more open, modern, and multiethnic nation.

Above all, she was a link to World War II, when as a teenage princess, she briefly trained as driver and mechanic in the army’s Auxiliary Territorial Service. She appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in her ATS uniform as hundreds of thousands celebrated the end of the war in Europe. She was a link to what Churchill famously called Britain’s “finest hour.”

The quiet force all this brought to her voice was never so evident as during the pandemic.

In a televised address to millions of her locked-down subjects, she extolled the virtues of self-sacrifice, generosity, and a “pride in who we are.” And she ended with a deliberate echo of the most popular song of Britain’s wartime years: “We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again, we will meet again.”

Tyrone Siu/Reuters

People queue up outside the British Consulate-General in Hong Kong Sept. 12 to pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II after her death.

She viewed her role as standing above the political fray, accommodating rather than resisting the huge changes around her, and seeking to bring people together.

Although she met weekly – in substantive, but hermetically private – conversations with 15 British prime ministers, she never publicly voiced her own political views. Her position was rooted not so much in what she did or said, as in what she chose not to do or say.

This was critical to her role as unifier: It allowed Britons young and old, on the right or left, to feel somehow that she shared their own views, their values and aspirations.

For the immediate future, Charles will benefit from the refracted affection tens of thousands of people across the country are showing toward his mother, likely to be in even greater evidence in the days ahead as she lies in state, and is buried, in central London.

He has also shown signs of having learned from her example during his own decades as heir-in-waiting. He has made a point of getting out in public, interacting with mourners and well-wishers. Critically, given his past record of outspoken comments on a range of political and social issues, he has made it clear that he knows those days are over. “I’m not stupid,” he told a recent interviewer. “I realize that it is a separate exercise being sovereign.”

Britain’s politicians, across the spectrum, have made it equally clear they’re hoping he succeeds in his new role. This isn’t just a matter of goodwill: They recognize how essential that role has proved, under his mother, to keeping the country broadly united.

And rarely have there been so many political and economic forces pulling in the other direction.

Britain’s economy is facing double-digit inflation, and a tumbling currency, as the twin result of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The country remains divided over Brexit – the withdrawal from decades-long membership in the European Union.

In non-English parts of the United Kingdom – Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland – local political leaders have shown growing alienation from London over a range of issues, as well as a desire for greater autonomy and, in Scotland’s case, independence.

King Charles III can’t address any of this directly. He knows it would be “stupid” to pretend otherwise.

His task will be different, but no less important: to provide space for – a reminder, and an expression of – what ultimately unites.

Megan Burt-Martineau/Honey Bee Photography/Courtesy of Leslie Fenwick

In her book “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold History of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership,” Dr. Leslie Fenwick documents the dismissal or demotion of thousands of Black educators following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Education has always played a crucial role in Leslie Fenwick’s life.

The dean emerita of the school of education at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and professor of education policy says that her parents were adamantly opposed to segregationist policies. They also taught her about Black educator excellence, a story she wasn’t taught in school.

Dr. Fenwick’s most recent book, “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership,” published earlier this year, tells the story of highly qualified Black educators displaced during school integration efforts. The book presents historical evidence showing that following the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation in schools, nearly 100,000 Black educators were dismissed or demoted from their positions and often replaced with less qualified white educators. That meant losing many Black teachers who had used scholarships offered by some states to attend schools like New York University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State University, and University of Michigan for their teaching credentials.

Dr. Fenwick spoke with the Monitor about the history her book documents, how she sees the events of the post-Brown era still affecting education today, and possible paths forward to address past harms. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Are there ripple effects from what happened to many Black educators following Brown v. Board of Education that we still see in schooling and the educator workforce today? What connections do you see between what happened in the past and today?

I do believe there’s a connection. I don’t think this history is dead, and I think we’re still living with the fallout of this history. When 100,000 Black educators were purged from the system, and these were the system’s most credentialed, experienced, and capable educators, you see that the system was not left in the hands of the most capable – at least in terms of the quantitative, normally accepted indicators of quality, which would be the teachers’ credentials. 

During the years that this purge is happening, the overwhelming majority, something like 72% of Black professionals, are educators, either principals or teachers. The Black community, and I would say the public school system generally, experienced four traumas: [First,] the loss of a generation of exceptionally credentialed and effective educators. [Second,] the worst trauma would be that experience of Black students who now found themselves in previously all-white segregated schools without models of intellectual authority in teachers or leadership authority in principals, with no models to guide them through violent attacks or to tell them how to negotiate racism. [Third,] economic trauma. One hundred thousand educators losing their jobs translated in the Black community to about a $1 billion economic cut. [And fourth,] Black educators stood as an example that there was a way to be educated, to obtain a working service to your community, and with the massive firings that notion was troubled, and I think it had implications for future generations pursuing becoming a teacher or principal.

You mention in the book what you call a myth, that following the Brown decision, Black educators left education for better jobs in different fields. How does your book show that to be a myth? 

This is a point that really is quite important to me because it’s repeated not only in commentary, but also even in the research literature, that with the Brown decision, Blacks fled the education professions to pursue careers previously not open to them. That myth has been used to say this is why there is an underrepresentation of Blacks in the education profession today. In fact, the historical record shows the Black educator pipeline was nearly decimated because of massive resistance by whites to the new law of the land, Brown v. Board of Education.

Labor statistics do not support that myth. We don’t see after Brown an uptick in Blacks leaving the teaching profession and becoming physicians or dentists or scientists with government agencies, or business executives in corporate America. 

Before Brown, in the 17 states that were operating racially segregated school systems by state law and custom, 35% to 50% of principals and teachers were Black. Today, about 7% of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers are Black, and about 11% of the nation’s nearly 90,000 or so principals are Black, and less than 3% of the nation’s nearly 14,000 superintendents are Black. In some ways relative to the Black educator pipeline, we’ve gone backward.

What impact did the dismissal and demotion of Black educators following Brown v. Board of Education have on the students who were attending newly integrated schools? 

One of the reasons why the hope of Brown is unfilled is because we didn’t integrate. We simply moved Black students into previously all-white segregated schools. Black students went into settings that were captured, I would say, by the segregationist hold on them. So the models of intellectual authority were almost exclusively white. The model of leadership authority was almost exclusively white. The curriculum was almost exclusively white in terms of imagery, in terms of content, and in terms of authorship. I think that combination accrues to the disadvantage of Black students’ intellectual and academic development. We have about 40 years of research that shows that when Black students and Hispanic/Latinx students are in highly diversely staffed schools, there are numerous academic and social benefits that accrue to them. 

What recommendations can you offer to people who are wondering what can be done now to help repair the harms from the past that your book documents? 

One of the great findings of the book is that the NAACP is certainly a champion for the case of Black educators when they are purged out of this system. The NAACP, at the urging of Black educators, engaged majority-white organizations, mainly the National Association for Secondary School Principals, which at the time was almost exclusively white and male. Yet the NASSP comes to the aid of Black principals and teachers and works with the NAACP to say this is wrong, and they are very adamant about it. They, along with the American Federation of Teachers and the American Jewish Congress – this multiracial coalition under the herculean leadership of the NAACP – fight for the right cause. I think there’s still a message there that interracial, pluralistic, diverse coalitions fighting on the side of right can make a difference and that we can get further in terms of achieving equality and equity goals when we collaborate in this way.

For policymakers, in 2022, [historically Black colleges and universities] produce over 50% of the nation’s Black teachers, but HBCUs are less than 3% of the nation’s colleges and universities, so these are really strong engines for the production of Black educators. Two Hispanic-serving institutions produce 90% of the nation’s Hispanic/Latinx teachers. I think there needs to be more investment in these institutions because they are strong engines for the production of teachers of color. That holds true for TCUs, tribal colleges and universities, as well. 

I also think that knowing and telling this history is important for the American dialogue because when we tell a false history and then set policy around that false history, or that false cause, our solutions are always off. 

Reuters

In this official photo, Ukraine soldiers patrol the liberated town of Kupiansk after a Russian retreat Sept. 10. The soldiers' faces have been blurred out.

The war in Ukraine took another unexpected turn last week. Much like the way Ukrainians repelled a Russian assault on the capital, Kyiv, six months ago, their military was able to retake several cities in the crucial northeast region during a six-day offensive.

The quick Russian retreat and the speed of the Ukrainian blitz suggest more than the quality of weapons may determine the outcome of this war. Ukraine’s troops clearly have higher morale as they are defending their land. Yet as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at the start of the war when he bravely stayed put in Kyiv, Ukraine’s best weapon is the truth.

Unlike most Russians, Ukrainians can easily follow reports of the war – both defeats and victories. Their military can more easily recruit willing volunteers, whereas Russia has seen large defections of its volunteer fighters and has experienced difficulties in enticing Russian men to sign up for service in Ukraine.

Even referring to the war as a war can land a Russian in jail. A poll in August by independent pollster Levada found 48% of Russians pay little or no attention to the events in Ukraine. Most media are tightly controlled by the Kremlin.

Ukraine’s ability to command truth as a weapon includes one clever ploy: Many of the captured Russian soldiers are handed a cellphone to call their mothers to reveal details about the war. This has spread news about corruption and bad leadership in the military.

Those problems may help explain Russia’s latest battlefield retreat. As Russian blogger Yuri Podolyaka wrote to his 2.3 million Telegram followers last week, the Russian people could soon cease to trust “the government as a whole.”

To win the war, Russian President Vladimir Putin might need to impose a draft. That alone would be an admission that the war is actually a war and not a “special military operation.” A lie would be exposed, undercutting his popularity.

Critics say Mr. Putin now fears a revolt among Russia’s elite as much as he fears an independent Ukraine. Last June, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Mr. Putin is afraid that a “spark of democracy” could ignite in Russia.

Ukraine is still a long way from winning the war. President Zelenskyy said over the weekend that the next 90 days will determine the country’s future. For now, Russia’s retreat may have put a spark among its people, one lit by Ukraine’s bright beam of truth-telling.