You Bring Her Warmth
The Fellowship | March 6, 2025
Galina is a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor who has spent her entire life in the same village where she was born. Growing up, she worked on a collective farm, primarily tending to beets in rural Ukraine. And she depended on the food that she would grow to survive.
The village is so remote that today she has no connection to a water system and must pump water from a well. She has no indoor bathroom, so she must go outside to a hut, often in below zero temperatures in the winter.
Now that Galina is elderly, it’s difficult for her to grow her own food as she did when she was young, so the food box and winter assistance brought by The Fellowship is lifesaving. When Fellowship volunteers entered her home for the first time, she greeted them without fear, remarking, “I’ve lived through war. Nothing’s going to frighten me.”
Her home is her sanctuary. In this modest space, she makes daily decisions about whether to spend her limited resources on food, medication, or heating. Galina suffers from high blood pressure and needs assistance with heating payments for the winter.
Life has been difficult, and Galina admits that, “Sometimes, I find it hard to make sense of everything.” She reflects on how she had to work at a young age on the farm, lost her father in World War II, and now another war has come and has injured her grandson who lost his arm in battle.
Still, she knows she can count on The Fellowship, and this provides her with some comfort. “Your visit has filled my heart with immense gratitude,” she says. “At my age, I often felt forgotten, as though the world had moved on without me. But seeing you here, traveling all the way from Israel and the United States, has brought warmth to my soul.”
