This is the first in a series of brief profiles of some of the internally displaced people (“IDP”s) currently sheltering at the nursing home where I am volunteering as a nursing aid.

Galina T. was born in 1939 in the city of Toretsk, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. At the age of 16, she began training to be an accountant.  After she finished her training she took a job at the local coal mine, where she worked for the next 40 years. 

She married a clever man, they had a son and lived happily.  

In 1981, when Galina was just 42 years old, her husband died.  She and her adolescent son had only each other.

Galina’s son also worked at the mine.  He married and had two daughters.

In 1988, Galina met “her ‘Yurochka’,” and from that moment her life was filled with zest again. “We lived for each other for 33 years, we did everything together, we almost never parted, he cared for me very much.” 

On October 14, 2014, war destroyed the serenity of their family – on this day Galina layed her son to rest. There, in the cemetery, during the funeral, the first explosion in the city rang out. In an obituary published in the local paper, Galina wrote:

"Covering, covering,
I’m covering my head
Under a black shawl,
And eternal sadness"

During the years between 2014 and 2022, the city of Toretsk was occasionally shelled by artillery.  The city frequently suffered shortages of drinking water and power outages. Galina’s daughter-in-law and the granddaughters moved away to a safer place.  But Galina and “her Yurochko stayed in their hometown and took care of each other as well as they could manage.

But in December of 2021 Yurko died, and for the next year it was as if time had frozen at that instant. 

However, in February of 2022, Russia launched a full-scale kinetic invasion into Ukraine, and Galina and everyone living in Toretsk was caught in the middle of it. To survive the artillery bombardment, she and her neighbors set up a shelter in the basement of their building. But at 84 years of age, Galina has limited mobility.  Living on the 6th floor, she found it difficult to go down to the shelter, so she sometimes stayed in the sixth floor apartment even while the city was under direct bombardment. She declined opportunities to evacuate two times, preferring to take her chances close to home. But when she awoke before dawn one morning in December, shivering under an icy hard blanket, she suddenly made up her mind, and left in the next group of displaced residents the volunteer evacuators transported out of the city.

The volunteers escorted her onto the “evacuation train” and 36 hours later Gennadiy and I met her at the train station in Khmelnitsky. We brought her back to the nursing home, where she is now part of the family. In her new home she has thoroughly warmed up again. Now she sleeps in a cozy warm bed and enjoys three hot meals daily and plenty of treats like fruit, cakes and sweets.

Her new friends also give her new energy. When the weather is fine, she loves to go out for long walks in the farmland and orchards near the nursing home. Once again, this irrepressible elderly lady is living happily again. Thanks to all those who cared and helped!