Why some Holocaust survivors mourn Ukraine, while others support Putin.
Roza Nemirovskaya By Olga Grigoryants
By Olga Grigoryants March 16, 2022
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Roza Nemirovskaya, then 16 years old, was forced to flee her hometown Ternivka in western Ukraine before hundreds of Jews were slaughtered and buried in a mass grave.
Not in her worst nightmare, she said, could she have imagined another devastating war in her homeland during her lifetime.
“When I start thinking about Russia and Ukraine, my soul is torn apart,” said Nemirovskaya, who is now 96 years old and lives in West Hollywood. “I get so upset, I want to die. What are they fighting for? Why is a brother killing a brother?”
As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth week, Holocaust survivors in Los Angeles have been glued to their screens, watching both American and Russian state-controlled news channels, witnessing families fleeing their homes, hiding in bomb shelters and Holocaust sites, including Babyn Yar, being targeted by Russian airstrikes. Most painfully, they are reliving the devastation they witnessed during World War II.
Roza Nemirovskaya By Olga Grigoryants
World War II, Nemirovskaya said, stole her youth. She worried the conflict in Ukraine could do the same to other young people.
“It’s not the fault of ordinary people that politicians can’t reach an agreement,” she said. “Why do they have to suffer?”
Another Holocaust survivor, Roza Zhelinskaya, said her children banned her from watching the news, but she tried to learn as much as possible about the war when her family was not at home.
It’s a tragedy, she said, to see families being bombarded in the basement with their children.
But Zhelinskaya, 97, supports Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision. He had no choice but to start the war, she said, because of the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region as “Russian- speaking residents lived in fear for about eight years.”
Based on her viewing of Russian-language TV she believes Ukrainian troops have been bombarding hospitals, schools and residential homes in Ukrainian cities — claims that the U.S., Ukraine and the international community have deemed baseless.
“People say that the war started by Putin,” Zhelinskaya said. “But it’s my understanding Putin didn’t want this war.”
Yakov Khazin, 90, said he was against the war, but he worried that the “Ukrainian nationalists were ruining the country.”
“The Ukrainian government is a group of nationalists,” he said, echoing a narrative from pro-Kremlin news channels. “We need to destroy them.”
Khazin said he experienced antisemitism when he lived in Ukraine before moving to the U.S. As a chief engineer at a large company, he believed he was denied a promotion because he was a Jew.
Khazin said he had many friends in Ukraine and “not all of them are nationalists.”
“It’s about the government,” he said. “You just need to install a better government in Ukraine, and everyone will be fine.”
Since the beginning of the war, Moscow has denied accusations of its plans to occupy its western neighbor, arguing it only tried to liberate civilians from Ukrainian nationalists armed with weapons supplied by the West.
Jared McBride, assistant adjunct professor of history at UCLA, said one of the reasons some Holocaust survivors might see the war in Ukraine as a conflict between Russia and Ukrainian nationalists — the narrative that the Kremlin has been promoting — is because of antisemitism they experienced while living in Ukraine.
“There was sort of a glass ceiling for Soviet Jews depending on where they lived,” he said, adding that many of them had trouble getting a job or getting into universities because of their ethnicity. Some of them still watch Russian cable, he said, to stay connected to their homeland.
In addition, the views of many Jews living in Soviet Ukraine, he added, were influenced by their experiences living in ghettos and of their fellow Jews being shot en masse outside of towns and cities.
“There were local collaborators and people who helped facilitate this process with some of them for an ideological reason or because they feared for their own lives,” he said, adding that those experiences might cause them “harbor anti-Ukrainian views.”
Some Holocaust survivors, McBride added, lived through three decades of anti-Ukrainian propaganda with Soviets demonizing Ukrainian insurgencies.
Because of that Jews who immigrated from Ukraine and have Ukrainian passports, might still affiliate themselves with Russia.
“The Ukrainian Jews are almost always Russian speaking,” McBride said. “They see themselves kind of more on the Russian cultural sphere.”
Still, Nemirovskaya said she hoped the two nations would reach a compromise in the negotiations over the conflict in Ukraine.
“It’s hard to think about what’s happening in Ukraine,” she said. “I hope it will stop soon.”
Get the Forward’s “Letter from California” delivered to your inbox. Sign up here to receive our lively and provocative insights, news, opinion and inspiration from the state at the leading edge of the Jewish future.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
