Putin’s Winter War Kills a Survivor of the Nazi Holocaust

A resident of Kyiv’s historically Jewish Podol neighborhood, Yevgenia Bezfamilnaya, was a survivor. In September 1941, the Nazis killed her parents at Kyiv’s Babi Yar, the largest killing field in the Soviet Union. Later, at a Soviet orphanage, directors gave her a last name — one that literally means “no name.”Speaking only Yiddish and Russian, she navigated modern Ukraine by keeping a low profile. Until two weeks ago, neighbors say, her only forays outdoors were regular walks two blocks from her apartment building to Kyiv’s Great Choral Synagogue. Then, in the chaos of Russia’s winter war on civilians, her neighbors lost track of the woman they called “Baba Zhenya.”Russian missiles destroyed heating plants. With temperatures hovering around zero Fahrenheit, water froze as solid as the Dnipro River ice that embraces Podol. When central heating flickered back on, neighbors concluded that water flooding through their building started on the fourth floor, the level of Baba Zhenya’s apartment.Police broke through a balcony door. In the darkness, they slid across the apartment floor as if on a skating rink. Novaya Gazeta reports on the scene: “On the equally icy bed, frozen like a Siberian mammoth, lay Baba Zhenya.”“She survived one genocide,” Euromaidan Press noted yesterday. “She did not survive another.”On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky led an International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration at Kyiv’s Babi Yar. He probably was unaware that one of the last survivors lay in her icy tomb only three miles away.“This is a clear lesson from history: when hatred against one people is not stopped, others must not remain indifferent or stand aside,” the president said, standing near a ravine where Nazi soldiers shot 33,000 Jews in 36 hours. “Aggression and contempt for the lives of people and entire nations must never prevail, and such protection of life must be the responsibility not only of the brave, but truly of all humanity.”President Vladimir Putin and his lieutenants routinely justify their war on Ukraine as a response to the need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. This appeals to many Russians’ deep pride in the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany two generations ago.However, in the face of facts, Mr. Putin’s appeal sounds like a 2026 version of Adolf Hitler’s “Big Lie.” During World War II, about 8 million Ukrainians died, including 1.5 million Jews. One Jewish survivor was Semyon Ivanovich Zelensky, Mr. Zelensky’s grandfather.“There were four brothers,” Mr. Zelensky told Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on a 2020 visit to Israel for Holocaust Remembrance Day. “Three of them, their parents and their families became victims of the Holocaust. All of them were shot by German occupiers who invaded Ukraine.” “The fourth brother survived,” Mr. Zelensky continued. “Two years after the war, he had a son, and in 31 years, he had a grandson. In 40 more years, that grandson became president, and he is standing before you today, Mr. prime minister.”Ukraine’s dwindling band of Holocaust survivors, all former Soviet citizens, have little sympathy for Mr. Putin’s imperial crusade against Ukraine.“Putin is trying to destroy us as a nation, just as Hitler tried to destroy the Jewish people in World War II,” Roman Schwarzman, then 88, told the German Bundestag on Holocaust Remembrance Day last year. Speaking in Ukrainian and Yiddish, he said: “Back then, Hitler wanted to kill me because I am Jewish. Now Putin is trying to kill me because I am Ukrainian.”Speaking from experience, he recalled how in December 2023, a Russian missile slammed into his apartment building at Odessa, another Ukrainian city with a rich Jewish history. “Miraculously, my wife and I were able to escape because we fled to the basement,” recalled Mr. Schwarzman, the chairman of the Ukrainian Association for Jewish Concentration Camp and Ghetto Survivors. “When we returned to the 10th floor, we did not recognize the apartment. Everything was shattered.”The survivor of the Berschad ghetto in Romania-occupied Ukraine, Mr. Schwarzman asked the German legislators to be aware of Moscow’s ambitions. “Anyone who believes that Russia will be satisfied with Ukraine is mistaken,” he said. “The world must stop being afraid. Ukraine is doing everything to keep the war from coming to you.”Belying stereotypes of European complacency, Bundestag members repeatedly responded with sustained applause. In March 2022, one month into the war, the Bundestag honored Boris Romanchenko, age 96. He had survived several Nazi concentration camps only to lose his life in a Russian attack on his apartment building. At the time, Mr. Zelenskiy said in a video address: “Just imagine how much he went through. He survived Buchenwald, Dora, Peenemunde, and Bergen-Belsen, the conveyors of death created by the Nazis. And he was killed by a Russian shell that hit an ordinary Kharkiv high-rise.”

Putin’s Winter War Kills a Survivor of the Nazi Holocaust

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