Moving Holocaust Survivors From Line of Fire

"They told me Germany was my best option. I told them, 'I hope you're right'."

"That first time, I was a child, with my mother as my protector." 

"Now, I've felt so alone. It is a terrible experience, a painful one."

"I wasn't afraid of Germany. I just could not stop thinking: 'Papa died in that war. My cousins died in that war."

Galina Ploschenko, 88, Holocaust survivor, Ukraine Evacuee to Hanover, Germany

 

"I understand the pain of these people, I know who they are."

"These scenes, these stories now -- in a way, it's like life is going full circle."

Pini Miretski, leader, medical evacuation team, Joint Distribution Committee, Jerusalem 

:I feel a kind of hopelessness because it does feel like history repeats itself."

"Today's war has ended any negative emotions I felt toward Germany."

Vlaldimir Peskov, 87, evacuated from Zaporizhyhia, Ukraine

Holocaust survivor Raisa Valiushkevych journeyed 72 hours to flee the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Image: Thomson Reuters/REUTERS/Timm Reichert

 

The Joint Distribution Committee is a humanitarian organization with a long history of evacuations, beginning with the smuggling of Jews out of Europe during World War 11. Its volunteers, for the last two decades have been engaged in reviving Jewish life in former Soviet countries, including Ukraine. The American Joint Distribution Committee has joined resources with the Jewish Claims Conference to rescue Holocaust survivors from Ukraine and bring them to safety, away from the conflict zone.

The Jewish Claims Conference saw its founding with the purpose of negotiating Holocaust restitutions with the government of Germany. It maintains a list of survivors used to distribute pensions and health care, normally. It now identifies people for the purpose of evacuation. Why Germany? ask many of those they propose to move out of Ukraine to calmer precincts where care for the elderly can be established. "One of them told us: I won't be evacuated to Germany. I do want to be evacuated -- but not to Germany", explained Rudiger Mahlo of the Claims Conference.

Mr. Mahler would explain to those hesitant or adamant about not moving to Germany: Germany, because it makes sense under these conditions. Germany, because it isn't the Germany of the Holocaust. And it is easily approached by ambulance through Poland when evacuating people from Ukraine. There is a well endowed medical system, a large population of Russian-speaking people, and his organization enjoys a close working relationship with government officials there.

Those who balk at entering Germany even under the extreme emergency situation that the Russian invasion of Ukraine entails, have the option as well of flying to Israel. That option is available to those whose level of frailty would not hinder them from that mode of transport. Many of the elderly Holocaust survivors living in long-term care homes in Ukraine have no wish to leave the country, despite the conflict; it is their home.

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945

 

Many of them have memories of Germany they have no wish to revive; desperately fleeing bombs. Hearing in hushed tones of massacres of Jews. Losing relatives. At that time they survived in the Soviet Union, and it was Soviet troops that liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp, one of the most notoriously infamous of the ring of work-, concentration- and death-camps established throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.

These are survivors of the most heinous, institutionalized genocidal 'Final Solution' whose family members perished in the hellfires of the Holocaust; they are elderly and they are physically fragile. And they have been plunged yet again into a psychic maelstrom of emotional dread. And now, to escape the inferno of another conflict with its incessant bombing, they are being evacuated to, of all places, the very country that planned to annihilate Europe's entire Jewish population.

Robbed of their families, of their childhood, of their expectation to live normal lives, being asked to trust that in Germany which once planned and carried out their mass annihilation through countless atrocities and the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz, to trust that they would find care and concern for their well-being in Germany. That they must now flee the violence of the Russian military, in a gross reversal of their existential experiences.

The rescue mission was organized by Jewish groups to take Holocaust survivors out of Ukraine by ambulance. Galina Ploschenko was trapped in her bed in Dnipro, at a retirement center while artillery strikes clapped overhead and air raid sirens shrieked through the air. Nurses and other retirees who could manage to walk, relocated to the institution's basement for cover from the blasts, but she was unable to move, remaining in her third-floor room, bedridden. 

Alla Ilyinichna Sinelnikova (left), 90, and Sonya Leibovna Tartakovskaya, 83, were recently evacuated from Ukraine to Germany. Both are survivors of the Holocaust, and this is the second time they are fleeing war. "I never thought I would live to see such horror for the second time in my life," says Sinelnikova. "I thought it was in my past, all over and done with. And now we're reliving it." Esme Nicholson/NPR

To the present, roughly 80 of the most frail Holocaust survivors have been successfully evacuated. Ukraine is home to an estimated 10,000 Holocaust survivors. Up to 40 people can be taken out in a single evacuation. The most difficult part of the process is convincing the frail elderly with their haunting memories that Germany is now a safe place for them to be evacuated to. Now settled in Germany, Ms.Ploschenko states "nothing but love" for the country while still remembering "everything" about the war she survived.

Her memory includes her mother covering her with a scarf, winding it around her naked body. That among the countless Jews murdered, there was an aunt and two cousins, smothered in mobile gas wagons called "dushegubka"; soul-killers. Her father disappeared and was never heard from again after he left to fight with the Soviet army.  During the evacuations ambulances have been forced to return to checkpoints in response to conflict flare-ups On occasion ambulances were confiscated by the military, for their own wounded.

 

Three U.S. soldiers look at bodies stuffed into an oven in a crematorium in April of 1945. Photo taken in an unidentified concentration camp in Germany, at time of liberation by U.S. Army.

 

Pini Miretski, leader of the Joint Distribution Committee medical evacuation team has his own searing memories. His great-grandparents were murdered at Babyn Yar, a ravine near Kyiv where tens of thousands of Jews were stripped and shot with machine guns between 1931 and 1943, their bodies shoved into the ravine. Early on in the invasion Russian missiles struck the memorial to the Babyn Yar massacres.