Holocaust survivors flee from Ukraine to Germany for safety
India Today
Several Holocaust survivors who had been living in Ukraine have now been taken to safety in Germany after Russia's continuous military attacks.
When the bombs started falling on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, last month, Tatyana Zhuravliova had a horrible deja vu: the 83-year-old Ukrainian Jew felt the same panic she suffered as a little girl when the Nazis were flying air attacks on her hometown of Odesa.
“My whole body was shaking, and those fears crept up again through my entire body — fears which I didn’t even know were still hidden inside me,” Zhuravliova said.
Her eyes welled up with tears as she remembered how she hid under the table from the bombs during World War II, and eventually fled with her mother to Kazakhstan when the Nazis and their henchmen started massacring ten of thousands of Jews in Odesa.
“Now I’m too old to run to the bunker. So I just stayed inside my apartment and prayed that the bombs would not kill me,” Zhuravliova, a retired doctor, told The Associated Press on Sunday.
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But as Russia’s military attacks on Ukraine become even more brutal and demolished residential apartment blocks, she realized that she had to flee again if she didn’t want to die. So Zhuravliova accepted an offer from a Jewish organization to bring her out of Ukraine to safety.
In an unexpected twist of history, some of the 10,000 Holocaust survivors who had been living in Ukraine have now been taken to safety in Germany — the country that unleashed World War II and organized the murder of 6 million Jews across Europe.
