50 Holocaust survivors had to flee Ukraine againonly this time the attack does not come from Nazi Germany, but from the Russian armed forces.
Eight decades after fleeing Ukraine due to the invasion of Hitler’s troops, Raisa Valiushkevych again had to flee her homeland, and it was precisely in the country of her former enemies that she was offered refuge.
Valiushkevych, 98, told Reuters that it seemed strange to have found sanctuary in the land of her former persecutors, but admitted times had changed and she felt “grateful and welcome”.
The retired teacher was evacuated along with other Holocaust survivors by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a humanitarian group that has been assisting Jews in Ukraine and around the world since its inception in 1914. Since February 24 last year, when Russian aggression was unleashed, this organization has drawn attention to refugees.
Many Ukrainians have come to Germany, one of the countries in Europe with the largest Jewish population in Europe and whose asylum programs give Jews a special welcome as part of an official policy of atonement for their past, Reuters reported.
From a Jewish nursing home in Frankfurt, Valiushkevych told this media outlet: “I have found a second home here and I feel good. I’m very grateful.”
The Jewish population of Ukraine before World War II was 1.5 million people; but the Nazi holocaust destroyed virtually all of them. Valiushkevych told Reuters how she, her sister and her parents first fled Ukraine in 1941; yet so many years later the shadow of those days fell again upon his people.
At his advanced age and with impaired vision, Valiushkevych had to struggle to reach the nearest bunker, while sirens blared in Kyiv and explosions could be heard all around his home. She never thought she would ever become a refugee again, she told Reuters.
The ambulance ride to the Polish border and from there to Frankfurt was difficult, said her 70-year-old son Vadym Valiushkevych: “The roads had been bombed. My mother had to get injections along the way.”
THE HORRORS OF WAR
Anatoly, 84, has also endured two wars and believes the one in Ukraine is much worse than that of 1945, he told EFE agency afterwards Russian bombing of Mariupol: “It’s terrible, it’s better not to go there, the soldiers are in the city, killing people and there is no gas, no electricity, no water and no food.”
This war is not like the Nazi war, it is worse, he assured. “This war has nothing to do with it, people are suffering and the Russians destroyed the city. They have very powerful weapons, not like seventy years ago.”
In Bucha, 37 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, as the Ukrainian army retook the city this weekend, found hundreds of corpses in its streets of people believed to have been killed by the invading Russian troops before retreating from the site.
At least that’s what the numbers show 300 residents of Bucha were killed during the month that the Russian occupation lasted in that place.