Outside the Jewish Community Center in the Polish city of Krakow, more than a dozen members wait to greet their guest of honor as snow falls.
A yellow ambulance arrives and Margaryta Zatuchna, 82, thin, with thick round glasses and an endless smile, gets out. She receives two bouquets of roses, one orange and one white.
She lowers her head slightly and inhales deeply to smell each stem. She is finally safe.
Forced to flee the Nazis as a baby, the Holocaust survivor was kicked out of her home again – this time by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Born in January 1940 in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Margaryta’s life began when Adolf Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewish communities across Europe.
Days before the Nazis invaded her hometown in October 1941, she fled to a village in the Ural Mountains, now part of Russia, with her family through the Soviet-owned turbine factory where her father worked.
“Your factory was evacuated with all the equipment to the east,” she said, adding that she and her mother were also.
Between 1941 and 1943, factory workers switched from making turbines to making mortars and repairing tanks for Soviet troops, she said.
“We were put in a little village with little huts, at the end there was a forest,” she recalled. “Sometimes the wolves would come to us, but the little children did not understand the danger.”
During this same period, in Kharkiv, the Nazis surrounded and murdered some 16,000 Jews. Many were shot at point-blank range or thrown into mass graves and left for dead.
After the Red Army regained control of the city in 1943, Margaryta returned to Kharkiv with her family and grew up under Soviet rule.
She finished her university studies and became an engineer, got married and had a child. She later divorced and remarried at age 40 to Valerii Verbitski, whom she described as a “good man”.
His life was simple and peaceful.
‘Explosion after explosion’
That peace lasted until February 24, when Russian forces launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine, invading its city, bombing neighborhoods, blowing up a government building and surrounding Kharkiv’s estimated 1.4 million residents.
“There was no water or energy, we couldn’t buy food. It became impossible to live,” she said, “The air raid sirens never stopped, there was explosion after explosion. A real war.”
Weeks of indiscriminate bombing by Russian forces terrified residents of Kharkiv. Tens of thousands have already fled Ukraine’s second-largest city as rare and unreliable evacuation corridors are awakened.
At first, Margaryta chose to stay and care for her husband, while receiving support from a generous neighbor. But the fight got closer and closer to her home.
“An explosion blew out all our windows,” she recalled. “After that shock, Valerii became weaker. It was as if his legs had been cut off from under him.”
The siege and relentless bombing took their toll: Margaryta woke up on the morning of March 20 to find that her husband had died in his sleep.
“We couldn’t bury him because of the war,” she said. “His body is still in the morgue.”
Not even a memorial honoring the victims of the Holocaust in Kharkiv was spared from Putin’s so-called denazification campaign. The menorah-shaped monument was scarred by shelling, two of its branches twisted and ripped off.
A sign nearby reads: “In December 1941 – January 1942, the Nazis annihilated the prisoners of the Kharkov Jewish Ghetto at Drobitsky Yar – over 16,000 people – elderly, women, children – just because they were Jews.”
travel days
Margaryta knew it was time to go. She sought out her younger brother in New Jersey, United States, and he quickly triggered her evacuation with the help of various charities in three countries.
“It is very difficult to see that my beautiful city, my beautiful city, where I have lived all my life, is destroyed,” she said, “I cannot understand such destruction – why?”
On Wednesday, March 30, a driver picked up Margaryta in a blue SUV, damaged in an earlier missile attack, with the windows blown out covered in plastic wrap.
“It was a very difficult road,” she said. “We would get information along the way from places that were bombed and we would take potholed and unpaved roads. I felt so sick.”
The pair traveled for two days, stopping overnight, through hundreds of kilometers of dangerous territory until reaching the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
After a night in a hotel, a volunteer Norwegian ambulance driver transported her across the Polish border to Krakow. This part of the trip was the easiest, she sat comfortably smiling and talking about geography – stopping only for the occasional nap.
But her journey is not over yet, Margaryta is waiting to receive a US visa to visit her brother in the US. She seems unfazed by all that she has endured.
“I wasn’t terrified,” she said of her five weeks under Russian bombardment.
When asked where she found her courage, she simply replied, “She comes to me.”
Margaryta insists she doesn’t want to become a refugee. The survivor – from the Holocaust and now Russia’s attack – hopes to return to Kharkiv to bury her husband of nearly 40 years and see her beloved city at peace again.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
