LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — The Soviet-era apartment blocks at the end of a tram line in this western Ukrainian city show an indifferent face to the world, blank and gray. But behind every lighted window is a story.

There is the couple who lament that they may never live in the house being built for them in bloody Bucha. There is the family that spent hours in their basement shelter in Irpin, trapped between armies. There is the woman who fled Kharkiv, becoming displaced for the second time in a decade.

They all escaped to Lviv, along with some 500,000 others -- a small fraction of the 10 million Ukrainians who have been chased by war from their homes and resettled elsewhere in the country.

Many sleep on mats in cultural centers and schools, shelter in crowded rooms with relatives and friends. Some plan to move on, perhaps crossing the border to nearby Poland and beyond. Others have put down the first fragile roots. The rest have little idea what to do.

Most just want to go home, if home still stands.

As many as 50 have found shelter in a nine-story building on Trylovskoho Boulevard. It is quiet; they can look through their windows and see a school, a playground, not a tank or rocket fire. It’s a world away from the danger that sent them running from their homes, though in recent days, Lviv too has been a target of Russian missiles.

The families live footsteps apart. They don’t know each other, but they recognize displaced people like themselves on sight, without exchanging a word. Take the small, clanking elevator, walk down the dim corridors and visit with them in their temporary apartments, and you’ll find limbo.

“It’s not my flat. It’s not my life,” Marta Kopan says. “But now I’m here.”

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Marta is 40 weeks pregnant; the baby, a girl, kicks her vigorously as she goes through bags of children’s clothing in the fourth-floor apartment the family borrowed from a cousin. Her birth plan, like so much else, has been abandoned — the place where she had expected to give birth was bombed.