Organizations help with escape
Holocaust survivors don’t want to leave Kyiv
4/4/2022 3:06 p.m
Before the Russian war of aggression, around 10,000 Holocaust survivors lived in Ukraine. Some have fled in the meantime, but some cannot or do not want to leave their homeland. So does Hanna Stryschkowa – who stays in her apartment even when there is an air raid alarm.
Hanna Stryshkova has not left her apartment on the ninth floor of a house near the Kiev government district since the beginning of the war. The 80-year-old Holocaust survivor lives with her daughter Olha. Son-in-law Oleh fights at the front. Even if there is an air raid, the women stay in the apartment instead of going to a shelter. “May it happen as God decides,” says Stryshkova fatalistically.
According to the Claims Conference, around 10,000 Holocaust survivors lived in Ukraine before the war. The organization, with its headquarters in New York, is committed to material compensation for those affected. It is unclear how many Holocaust survivors have fled so far, says a spokeswoman. However, most would come to Israel and Germany primarily because of local relatives. German organizations are now trying to help those affected in Ukraine – and when fleeing to Germany.
The photographer and filmmaker Luigi Toscano from Mannheim, who has known Stryschkowa from Kyiv for years, has repeatedly offered to bring her to Germany. But Stryshkova refused. “I think the first thing to do is save children,” she says. Because these are the future. The son-in-law is in the army, and her daughter doesn’t want to leave Kyiv. “Then I’ll drive alone and what will I do there? Have a heart attack?” she asks.
Hanna Stryschkowa survived the Holocaust in the German concentration camp at Auschwitz. The Auschwitz Museum has researched that she probably arrived on a train from Minsk on December 4, 1943. Therefore, she assumes that she has Belarusian roots. After the end of the war, her foster parents in Kyiv gave her a new date of birth, May 1, 1941. “For me, the Ukraine is my home, it’s my country. She got me on my feet and gave me everything,” the doctor of biology looks up her long life back. Stryschkowa met Toscano through a photo project about Holocaust survivors. For his commitment to the “Against Forgetting” project, the artist received the “Artist for Peace” award from Unesco in 2021, as well as the Federal Cross of Merit.
Some survivors have already fled to Germany
Toscano says he, along with an employee at the German embassy in Ukraine and a network of helpers, is also in contact with 25 other Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. The goal is to bring them all to safety in Germany. As long as Hanna Stryschkowa is still in Ukraine, he will at least organize food, medicine and money for her, says the 49-year-old. Other Holocaust survivors have already fled to Germany.
86-year-old Borys Sabarko now lives in Stuttgart with his daughter and granddaughter. “My daughter said: You have to save your granddaughter,” says Sabarko. It was horrible for his granddaughter. When the war in Ukraine began, she cried a lot and couldn’t sleep for days. At the beginning of March he fled to Germany with her, and his daughter followed a few weeks later. “There were millions of people at the train station. Everyone wanted to get out of Kyiv.” As a young boy, Sabarko survived the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis in what is now Ukraine – from 1941 to 1944 in the ghetto in Sharhorod. Sabarko has now fled to Stuttgart because he has relatives and friends there. Germany has learned its lessons from history, says the historian, who received the Federal Cross of Merit in 2009. The country is trying everything so that the past does not repeat itself.
Thousands of people have been killed since Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine began. A survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp also died in a bomb attack in Kharkiv. The 96-year-old Boris Romantschenko died in an attack on his multi-storey apartment building in the eastern Ukrainian city, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation said about two weeks ago. The Brandenburg Memorials Foundation has called for support for the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps in Ukraine. The foundation participates with around 30 other initiatives, memorial sites and museums in an aid network for victims of Nazi persecution in Ukraine.
Life difficult even before the war
According to its own information, the Central Welfare Office of Jews in Germany has already started the rescue of Shoah survivors from Ukraine who are in need of care with the Claims Conference. Those affected were initially housed in Jewish nursing homes. In addition, due to the great need, associations such as Caritas and Diakonie are now also providing places in their facilities, it said.
Even before the war, life was difficult for many Holocaust survivors in Ukraine, as Inna Markowych, wife of Kiev Chief Rabbi Jonatan Markowych, recounts. “The average pension in Ukraine is $70 a month. That’s not enough to survive.” In their community alone, which has around 2,500 members, they have already distributed 800 food parcels plus medicines per month and run a soup kitchen in the past. They would have cared for 200 bedridden members. Hundreds of their community members are therefore Holocaust survivors. Several of those affected have now also come to Israel, as confirmed by the Jewish Agency, which is responsible for immigration. A 100-year-old Holocaust survivor was rescued from Kyiv with the help of the Israeli rescue service Zaka.
In the coming months, Israel expects to take in around 100,000 immigrants from Ukraine who are Jewish or have Jewish relatives – and are therefore entitled to immigrate to Israel. Although Sabarko now lives in Stuttgart, his homeland is and will remain the Ukraine. He didn’t want to leave, he says. “I hope to be able to come back soon. But I can’t make a prediction because I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”