He lived through the horrors of war as an infant, when he found himself in the hands of the infamous German doctor Josef Mengele, in the infernal camp of Auschwitz Birkenau, and after miraculously escaping the devilish experiments of the “angel of death”, today he declares her apartment in besieged Kyiv, that after she managed to survive Adolf Hitler, she will also survive Vladimir Putin.
The story of Holocaust survivor Anna Strishkowa, who lives in the Ukrainian capital with her daughter, is told in the Athenian / Macedonian News Agency by a German (with Italian roots) photographer who met Luigi Toscano before nine years, photographing her for the “Lest we forget” project, in which she immortalized the faces of 400 Holocaust survivors traveling from the US, Germany and the Netherlands to Israel, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.
Since then, Luigi Toscano has been in close contact with Anna Striskova, even preparing a documentary about her life. With the outbreak of war in Ukraine he tried to persuade her to leave the country, with his help, to find safe haven. Her response, however, to each of his admonitions is unequivocally the same: “Once I have managed to survive under Hiller, I will also survive under Putin. We will win!”
“I have a lot of contacts and I could assure her from the first moment – long before things take a turn for the worse – to bring her to the Polish border. She, however, stubbornly refuses. Both she and her daughter who lives with her and cares for her.I think it’s a mixture of patriotism and fear that she feels and as she has learned to stare at her fears, she chose to stay there.He keeps telling me: Luigi, we will win. I have nothing to lose “, the German photographer tells APE-MPE.
“You stare at fear”
Luigi Toscano remembers as today their first contact, for the needs of his project. “It was an exciting first meeting. She was very open and she told me about her life. She was only a year and a half old when she was taken with her parents to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where her mother and father were immediately executed by the Nazis and she was in “the famous photographer remembers that the only information she managed to find in the archives about her family is that she was in Auschwitz with her parents from Minsk and that she is the only survivor of the family.
Anna Striskova was miraculously saved and later adopted by a Ukrainian couple. Growing up she tried to exorcise the fear she had nestled in her soul for doctors, studying medicine herself. “She was very young, but the pain was so great when they carved in her little hand the number (prisoner) or later what she lived in Mengele’s hands,” says L. Toscano, who took a very important life lesson from his girlfriend. of.
“Anna is an amazing person. She taught me a lot about fear. She told me, Luigi, if you are afraid of something you should not go far, but go against it. She told me that she was so afraid of doctors after the trauma “The experience she had as a child and the only way she found to exorcise her fears and face her nightmares was to become a doctor herself,” notes the German photographer, explaining that it was the trauma to her soul that she grew up trying to to find ways to cure it.
“She is so calm and at the same time so strong. Every day I communicate with her through messages and I try to convince her, and she thanks me for caring, but she insists on staying in her homeland. She keeps telling me that this communication is the best support for her. she and her daughter and when I tell her “the Russians are coming”, she calmly replies: “I know, do not worry.” Tuscany, with obvious emotion in his voice.
The last time they were found alive was a few months ago, when the German photographer had traveled to Ukraine for the needs of the documentary he is preparing. “I’m not very religious but I pray every night for her and her daughter to be safe,” says the German photographer, who does not hide his sadness and anxiety about everything that is happening in Ukraine. “When you see the pictures on TV, the feeling is very strange,” he says.
Source: AMPE
Source: Capital
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