On what it means to zoom into a war zone every week — and why I hesitate before I answer.

Yesterday I had my weekly Zoom call with Ella and Galina.

Ella joins from her home in Dnipro. Galina signs in from Kyiv. Both looked exhausted. Both looked unsettled, worried in the way that people look when they have been worried for so long that the worry has settled into their bones. And yet — Ella’s bright red lipstick was perfectly applied, not a smudge out of place. I have come to understand that lipstick as a kind of quiet defiance.

She told me that she and her family had spent the night in the hallway. They didn’t even bother going to bed. They set sleeping bags up in the hallway and waited out the night. When a brief lull came in the early morning, she raced her grandchildren to school — because the school had just finished building a bomb shelter three stories below ground, and her grandchildren are safer there than in their own home.

All day, the air raid sirens had been going off. That alone was unusual. The drone attacks typically come at night. Throughout our call, both Ella and Galina paused periodically to check whether they needed to move to the hallway. At one point, I heard a low rumbling. Ella turned toward her window. She had heard an explosion. A building nearby had been hit.

Later, I read the reports. Russia had fired more than 1,000 drones into Ukraine that day. More than 1,000. The “typical” — and I use that word with full awareness of how grotesque it has become — is somewhere between 400 and 500. An apartment building in Dnipro had been struck. Multiple injuries were reported.

Let me unpack something, because I think it needs unpacking.

When people hear the word “drone,” many picture the small buzzing gadgets hobbyists fly in parks on weekend mornings. Annoying, yes. Occasionally invasive. But largely harmless.

What Russia is firing into Ukrainian cities are not those drones.

These are large enough to carry explosive payloads. They fly long distances. They are roughly the size of a small glider plane. Now take that image — and multiply it by hundreds. Hundreds of them, at night, flying over your neighborhood. You cannot see them clearly in the dark, but you can hear them. And you know that each one is capable of destroying a home, a car, a business, a school. Capable of killing your family.

Now imagine you are 85 years old.

You cannot move quickly. Your hearing is not what it was. Your vision is failing. Perhaps you live alone. Perhaps there is no bomb shelter in your building — just a staircase, or an archway in the hallway, which is where you have been told to go when the sirens sound. So that is where you go. In the middle of the night. Alone.

And now understand: this has been happening for four years. With increasing intensity. Four years of sirens and hallways and drone strikes and Zoom calls interrupted by distant explosions. It has become, in a terrible and very human way, normalized — even as it remains, by any moral measure, absolutely abnormal.

I am an Executive Director of a small nonprofit. We support elderly Jews in Ukraine.

Most Executive Directors do not zoom into a war zone on a weekly basis.

Most Executive Directors do not sit with that particular pause — the one I feel when someone asks what I do, and I say I work for a small nonprofit, and they ask what kind of work, and I take a breath before I answer. We support elderly Jews in Ukraine. I have learned to watch people’s faces in that moment. I watch to see which word lands first, and how. Jewish. Ukraine. Sometimes both at once, in different directions.

There is complexity in that pause that I cannot always explain quickly at a cocktail party or a community event. But I feel it every time.

What I can tell you is this: Ella and Galina are not abstractions. They are colleagues who have become friends. They show up every week, exhausted and worried and, in Ella’s case, wearing their red lipstick with precision and purpose. They show up because the work continues. Because the elderly Jews they serve — isolated, frightened, many of them without family — need them to show up.

The least I can do is show up too.

And the least any of us can do is bear witness. To say: we see this. We know this is happening. We refuse to let it become background noise.

One thousand drones in a single day. A building in Dnipro, hit. A grandmother, sitting upright in a hallway, waiting for morning.

This is not a distant crisis. This is Tuesday.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)