In Donetsk, I Remembered a Woman in the West Bank
At the frontline in Donetsk, I steadied my voice and filmed my piece to camera. Months later, I stood silently in the ruins of a Palestinian woman’s home in the West Bank, unable to say anything.
I remember sitting underneath the abandoned house in Donetsk after I’d awkwardly clambered down the ladder in my protective gear into the basement - dug out of the foundations - and sitting among the six or seven Ukrainian soldiers.
I remember feeling the adrenaline that had started as we drove towards the frontline in silence at dusk, and the sound of artillery coming in and going out next to us as we exited the car and ran into the house.
I remember looking around me, noting how relaxed those soldiers were - smiling even - as they showed us their drone operations targeting Russian troops barely a few hundred metres from where we were.
I remember thinking to myself: I’m here.
And then I remember thinking: I’ve got to make it count. I have to tell the story I came here to tell.
And then I took a deep breath, and told Suad to hit record so I could do my piece to camera.
There is something about a lens that I’ve always found can put distance between what’s happening. It is a kind of time machine, or transportation device. Knowing that when you record, it will - hopefully, I remember thinking in that Donetsk basement - be a future version of myself watching that back, judging how this version did.
Even with live reports, it has this power, for me, of removing myself, ironically, from the situation it’s recording me in. During those lives, I puff my chest out, remind myself of my facts and lines and go. I don’t think about what’s happening or what I’m looking at. It’s a powerful form of detachment - almost outer body.
At least, it can be.
I think about presence a lot. What it means to be somewhere, physically and emotionally. How we notice it, as viewers, and as people. What it’s like to share space and time with people, and the marks it leaves on you all. How the most inconsequential of things to one of us make a world of difference to another. I think about what we say, and what we don’t say. How our actions speak, and how context frames our understanding of one another.
I think about it when I’m in front of the camera, and I think about it when I turn the camera on others. I think about it too when that camera then turns away - and how the person I’ve just filmed feels presence differently when the lens is on them, and then when it stops.
I remember the woman in the occupied West Bank village of Mugayyeh that I took a picture of. I remember her, even though her story never made it into my report on the settler attack there - when some 1,500 of them had descended on the village in retribution for the death of a 14-year-old Jewish shepherd boy they believed had been killed by Palestinians.
At least one man was killed defending his home, we were told by his brother, Morad. He’d been the focus of the piece and had shown us through his house to where his brother died. We’d seen dozens of torched vehicles, including a fire engine, which lined part of the road into the village. We looked around at what else had been attacked.
We were shown the woman’s home - a small, single-story concrete building with maybe three or four rooms. It wasn’t smouldering, but from a distance, it was clear what had happened. Our local fixer, Samer, had her pointed out to us, standing outside her neighbour’s home, where children were playing on a makeshift swing, laughing even among the char and the strangers speaking a language they didn’t understand.
The woman walked into her home with us.
She’d lived in that house most of her life. It was gone - everything but her life - in almost an instant. She couldn’t have been younger than 70. She didn’t speak. Not a word. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her anything. I wasn’t sure what to say.
I remember treading on the ashes and feeling like I was walking through everything her life had been reduced to. I thought about my shoes, and how inappropriate it felt to be wearing them inside her home, even as it was.
I took a photo, but then stopped myself from asking Furkan to film her. I felt like a voyeur. But I knew I had to be there. She didn’t say anything to us. I didn’t ask her anything. I wasn’t sure there was much to say. I was powerless to help her.
But I looked her in the eye, my phone down by my side, Samer, Furkan, and others in another room. I felt her presence, and she felt mine. She knew we hadn’t filmed her. But, for a moment, there was an acknowledgment that she and I were both there, present, in what was her house - her life. I knew that it was important she saw me witness it. I let her know that I saw it, and I saw her.
Even though her story didn’t make it into my report, hers is the one that has stayed with me. I feel her presence when I look at that photo, in a way that reaches past the moment we shared that space. But what I remember wasn’t captured on a lens. It can’t be. There is no way of conveying what it truly feels like to stand in the cinders of someone’s home like that.
My presence there changed nothing for her reality, as it so often feels like it does wherever we go to report.
The camera didn’t protect me from that. It didn’t distance me, or provide me with a detachment from what was happening around me. I couldn’t just take a deep breath afterwards and remember the facts and key lines of what happened.
Instead, now she, and that moment, have been framed by something far more powerful: presence, and memory.
If this resonates - or if you’ve witnessed a moment that’s stayed with you - I'd welcome hearing your story.
If you’re interested in the report we ended up filing, you can watch it below.
