Iya Razhitskaya, a 92-year-old Ukrainian Jew, fled Kyiv twice. The first time was in 1941, when he was only 10 years old and German bombs began to fall on what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The second time was last year, when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th.

“I didn’t think it could ever happen,” Razhitskaya told Reuters, sitting in the small one-bedroom apartment she shares with her son Artur in Krakow, Poland.

“Before, the Germans were the enemy. But I don’t understand Russians. They think they are defending their country, defending themselves, but they attacked us. Kharkov was destroyed, for what reason?”

Rayitskaya slowly goes through the family photos she took from Kyiv, along with some books, documents, and essentials. She tries to understand herself in her youth in photographs. Her eyesight fails her, but her memories are still alive.

He was born in 1931 into a respectable Jewish family. Her grandfather, Nuhim Weisblat, was the chief rabbi of Kyiv, her father, Volodymyr, was a writer and publisher of books by Ukrainian authors, including Taras Shevchenko, the “founder” of Ukrainian literature.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in early July 1941, Rajitzkaya woke up to the sound of bombs. As a young pioneer, a member of the youth organization of the Soviet Union, she was assigned to issue calls for young men to go to war.

But her father knew that as Jews they were no longer safe in Kyiv.

“He said in a panic that we had no choice but to leave. But it was already almost impossible. In July, the panic was terrible, everyone who could leave: the Communists, and the Jews, and everyone else, ”said Radzhitskaya.

Her parents took her and her brother and fled first to Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. From there they traveled across the Soviet Union to Tashkent, the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan, nearly 3,800 kilometers from their hometown.

Radzhitskaya recalls that they left Kharkov on 21 September. On September 29, the massacre took place at Babi Yar. Over the course of two days, the Nazis killed some 33,771 Ukrainian Jews, one of the largest massacres of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust.

Russian shells hit the area near the monument

Babi Yar in March 2022.

Friday, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The Raitskaya family returned to Kyiv after the war. She got a job as a printer, got married and gave birth to her only son Arthur, aged 54.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, they fled, with the help of the Kyiv synagogue, first to Moldova and then to Lithuania, where they were given an apartment. But for Arthur there were few job opportunities.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish charity in the Kiev branch that her grandfather had once headed, invited them to Warsaw and then to Krakow.

“Completely Dissolved”

Having moved from Kyiv to 10 different apartments, Rayitskaya and her son now have one free for three months. From the window they see the Russian flag flying over the Russian consulate.

If you look from the other side, then the street is similar to the Kyiv one, Rayitskaya says.

“I want to go home. Just go out and talk to the neighbors in a language that I understand,” he said. “I had my own daily life, everything. And then everything was ruined for me.”

According to her, in Kyiv, a grave is waiting for her next to her parents.

“There is even a sign with my name already. You just need to add the last digits and everything, everything will be fine.”

In the 11 months since the invasion, Russia has killed thousands of civilians, forced millions to flee their homes and reduced entire cities to rubble.

It says his “special military operation” was necessary to counter the security threat posed by Ukraine’s ties to the West. Kyiv and its allies say that Ukraine has never threatened Russia, and the invasion is an aggressive war to subdue a neighbor and seize territory.

Source: Reuters.