Roman Gerstein, an 83-year-old Ukrainian Holocaust survivor, has a blunt riposte for Kremlin justifications of its invasion: “There are no Nazis here.”
For supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukraine’s alleged “genocide” of Russian speakers in the country’s eastern regions is comparable with the actions of Nazi Germany.
And that, they argue, requires “de-Nazification”.
Gerstein is having none of that.
A slightly built man wearing an oversized suit, his eyes twinkling behind round glasses, he explained how he had to flee from real Nazis.
“In fact I am one of the few people to have been evacuated twice from Chernobyl,” he said with a laugh.
Gerstein spoke to AFP at the synagogue in Kryvyi Rig, central Ukraine.
The first time he fled was when Nazi Germans occupied his hometown of Chernobyl in 1941, he said; the second was 45 years later, in 1986, when the town was the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident.
Born in 1939, Gerstein was two years old when his father put his family on a boat to Kyiv to flee the Nazis — and from there they caught a train for Tajikistan.
When they finally returned to Chernobyl they discovered that the Jewish community no longer existed.
“Those who stayed behind now rest for good underground,” he said. “Seven hundred people: women, children, elderly.”
– ‘Rewriting history’ –
Lyubov Petukhova, who turns 100 in November, remembers fleeing with her family from the central Ukraine region of Vinnytsia to Uzbekistan.
In her village of Botvyno all the Jews who remained were “tortured, murdered”, she told AFP in her apartment with a hard stare.
Gerstein and Petukhova are remnants of Ukraine’s once large Jewish community, which has endured a history of pogroms, Holocaust and communist-era purges.
The Jews were almost completely wiped out in Ukraine during the Holocaust, in which Nazis killed a total of six million European Jews.
A 2019 study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem concluded that there were only between 48,000 and 140,000 Jews left across the whole country.
Another Holocaust survivor, 84-year-old Felix Mamut, recalled how before World War II his extended family included his great-grandmother, her 16 children, and a host of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
But 72 of them were killed in Babyn Yar ravine, the site of a 1941 massacre where Nazis executed more than 30,000 Jews.
Between 1941 and 1944, about 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were massacred, often by shooting, by Nazis who, on the move, were sometimes assisted by local collaborators.
But “we don’t know their number”, Anton Drobovych, director of the National Institute of Memory, told AFP. Collaboration “was never a mass phenomenon” in Ukraine, he said.
Conversely, two to three million Ukrainian soldiers fought and died with the Red Army during the war.
According to Drobovych then, Moscow calling Ukraine a “Nazi” country makes “no sense”. It is a “rewriting of history” aimed at…
