Moldova has become a kind of hub for our work in and around Ukraine. From the capital, Chisinau, the Jews our team evacuated from the crisis zones in Ukraine are making Aliyah to Israel. Here, we have established contact with Jewish communities whose survivors and those in need we have now been able to include in our sponsorship program. And this is also the starting point for my first trip to Ukraine in a year.
When he sees me, Lyova throws her arms around my neck. “I’m so glad to see you! That you still think of me!”
Lyova was one of the first Holocaust survivors we accepted into our sponsorship program five years ago. Until now, he has lived in Uman in southeastern Ukraine. He is now waiting in Chisinau for his flight to Israel.
"I never wanted to leave my apartment. I've lived there for so long. But then they bombed the grain silos, just a few hundred meters from my apartment building. The shockwave hit my balcony too. You know, I've been through a war before, and I know when it's better to disappear."
The outbreak of war at the end of February brought it all back. Lyova was seven years old when the Wehrmacht marched into his hometown of Lubny near Kharkiv. “I remember exactly how we all huddled in the cellar. It had these narrow windows upstairs that looked out onto the street. Suddenly I saw foreign soldiers’ boots.”
Lyova and his sister survived because a Ukrainian neighbor took them aside on the way to be shot and passed them off as her own children. Now Lyova has sold his apartment in Uman and plans to care for his bedridden sister in Israel. Next year we are invited to Haifa for his birthday – Lyova will be 90.
Lyova is one of the few of her generation who, even in their later years, manage to break free and start a new life. Most have stayed in their old Soviet-era apartments and are waiting for me on the other side of the border.
