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. 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. Zhuravliova was part of the first group of four Jewish Holocaust survivors evacuated from Ukraine by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference. The group represents the world’s Jews in negotiating for compensation and restitution for victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs, and provides welfare for Holocaust survivors around the globe. A second group of 14 Holocaust survivors, many of them ill and bed-ridden, were brought out of Ukraine on Sunday. The Claims Conference is working with its partners, among them the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, to get as many Holocaust survivors out of Ukraine as possible. Around 500 Holocaust survivors in Ukraine are especially in need of help because of their ailing health — their evacuation is a top priority, says the JDC. It’s a highly difficult and complex operation to transport such frail people out of Ukraine, where constant shelling and artillery fire make any evacuation very dangerous. It involves finding medical staff and ambulances in numerous war zones, crossing international borders and even convincing survivors, who are ill and unable to leave their homes without help, to flee into uncertainty again, this time without the vigor of youth. However, the risks of staying behind are also very high. This month, 96-year-old Boris Romanchenko, who survived several Nazi concentration camps during World War II, was killed during an attack in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. It is not known if any other survivors have been killed in the war in Ukraine, but several have had their homes hit by shelling, says Amos Lev-Ran from the JDC. “No one can imagine the nightmare survivors have lived through during the Holocaust,” said Ruediger Mahlo, who works for the Claims Conference in Germany. “Now they need to evacuate again — their security, all […]

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