We knock on the door and hear a three step waltz (1-2-3, 1-2-3) shuffle across the room, before we hear the door unlock and a tiny lady with a cane opens the door for us.
“Come in”, she says.
She’s particular about her home, and gives us places to set our bags. She meticulously switches on lights, so high up she can hardly reach them, and off when leaving a room. She shows us into a room with large windows, ordering our partner, “Sasha, turn out those lights” in the entryway we just left.
Chairs are arranged under her instruction, and only after we sit does she sit down onto the couch next to the window.
“Well,” she says, gesturing to it. And the story comes out.
At 10:40 on a sunny Thursday last July, a Russian rocket hit an administration building in central Vinnytsia, a city far from the front lines. The damage extended to a nearby building where an international conference was taking place – injuring delegates.
Valentina lives about 400 metres away from the blast.
“I [was sitting on the couch near the window] and heard a big noise and suddenly this entire window shattered and there was glass everywhere”.
She has two large ceiling-high windows in two rooms of her house. They bring in a lot of light and, as she lives on the ground floor, allows her to look out to a small flower bed. Both were completely shattered as a result of the rocket attack.
She told us that thankfully most of the glass fell not on her, but on the floor, window frame, and outside. She called our partner right away, but because the police had cordoned off the area, none of the staff could get to her until late afternoon. They made sure she was okay, helped her clean up the glass, and started taking measurements of the window.
Back in London, we got a call. We’d known that a rocket had hit Vinnytsia, and earlier had messaged our partner to see if everyone was alright. He was calling now to ask if he could redirect available budget from a home repairs project we were funding to replace Valentina’s windows. We agreed immediately.
By the following Tuesday, Valentina’s windows were completely refitted.
Valentina’s story is rare. Vinnytsia, in western Ukraine has largely escaped the indiscriminate shelling that Kharkiv, Kyiv, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and many other cities farther east have been experiencing for over 18 months. Moreover, people in those cities have sometimes had to wait months before managing to get their shelled homes and windows repaired. Travelling through Ukraine, it was not uncommon to see windows boarded up with particle board at best, plastic sheets or fabric coverings at worst, even throughout the winter.
Across Ukraine the scale of devastation is hard to comprehend. The Kyiv School of Economics has estimated damage from the destruction of housing stock at €50.7 billion ($54 billion). It is estimated that since February 2022 more than 1.4 million housing units have been damaged over one-third of the damaged units are destroyed, while two-thirds are partially damaged. World Jewish Relief has been repairing homes, working through local partner organisations, in Eastern Europe since 2011 and has repaired 3,032 homes to date. Housing in countries of the former Soviet Union was built quickly, and often poorly, during Soviet times and has not withstood the test of time, causing homes to fall into disrepair. Pension levels and personal savings typically are far from sufficient to enable older people to fund repairs themselves.
When we visited, 8 months after the rocket attack that destroyed her windows, Valentina couldn’t thank us enough. When we took a photo together, she asked for a copy “so that when I lay down to sleep at night, I can think [about you]… I want to you remember you, such great, nice, young people… I wish you health, your relatives, your countrymen, so that everything with us will be good and calm again. I feel that if you do good in life, good will return to you, as it has to me”.
