Yuliia Korzun was welcomed by her British sponsor after travelling 2,000 miles from her home in southern Ukraine
"On March the 14th or 15th I understood that if someone can come to your door to kill you, this is not right," she says in her excellent English.
"I decided that I needed to go to a different place. I want to be useful, so I wanted to find a place where I could be useful."Ms Korzun fled first to Bulgaria, then to Romania, before finally flying from Bucharest to Birmingham.They applied for her visa three days later. After chasing up the application, with help from Evesham MP Nigel Huddleston, it was approved earlier this week.
On the day Ms Korzun was granted her visa, initially for a six-month stay, hundreds of others in her home town were queuing for buses to take them to safety in Romania.Ms Nishigaki says there was no real discussion between her and her husband about sponsoring refugees. It was something that they both immediately thought was the right thing to do.
"There's a strange feeling almost of guilt that you're not going through what these people are going through," she says."And if you can go to bed each night knowing that you did at least one good thing or made one person happy or that you made a person smile, then your life was worth living that day."
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