In 1942, with Soviet field hospitals losing wounded soldiers to infection faster than to shrapnel, a microbiologist named Zinaida Yermolyeva and her assistant Tamara Balezina spent months screening mold samples from damp, disused corners of wartime Moscow, including its bomb shelters, hunting for something that could do for the Red Army what Britain’s penicillin was already doing for the Allies. They found a workable strain, later named Krustozin, credited with saving a great many soldiers who would otherwise have died of sepsis. Soviet propaganda later inflated this into a claim that Yermolyeva had invented penicillin itself, a myth Russian officials still occasionally repeat and that independent fact checkers have rightly corrected: Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in London in 1928, and Florey’s Oxford team turned it into a usable drug before Yermolyeva began her own work. What she and Balezina actually did was independently find a Soviet strain in the unglamorous, overlooked spaces a besieged city still had to offer.

I think about that this year, watching footage from Israeli bomb shelters. A shelter beneath a Jaffa apartment block doubling as a kindergarten by day and a refuge by night. A packed safe room in Jerusalem where a mother turns an air raid siren into a song to keep her toddler calm. These spaces have become, almost by accident, sites of real adaptation: camaraderie, humor, improvised routine, the sort of resilience outsiders rarely anticipate. It is easy, and not wrong, to read this as a story about Israeli social cohesion. But it is also a story about infrastructure and foresight, about which forms of shelter a society builds before the missiles arrive, and which it does........

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