Fifteen dead in a Russian bombardment in Kherson…

by time news

9:30 a.m.: The Odyssey of a Holocaust survivor

Borys Shyfrin had to flee his country as a child to escape the Nazis. Eight decades later, it is in Germany that this Ukrainian has found refuge, on the threshold of his existence. “All I have left is these things,” sighs the 81-year-old man, pointing to a few shirts donated by volunteers in his bedroom wardrobe. This room is no longer in Mariupol, his hometown in southern Ukraine, but in Frankfurt, in western Germany, where he has been staying in a retirement home since July.

Borys Shyfrin is one of those Ukrainian Jews, Holocaust survivors, who found refuge in the country whose family Hitler’s regime persecuted during World War II. If he had “no desire” to leave Mariupol where he had a “good life” before the Russian invasion, the pensioner had to resolve to do so during the siege of the port city by the Russian army, which ended up in May taking control. “There was no more gas, no more electricity, no water either,” he says.

In the city pounded for months, corpses littered the streets, he recalls. “There were so many… No one was picking them up. People got used to it – nobody paid attention to it anymore. A widower, this former military radio engineer lost contact with his only son several years ago. A rabbi and volunteers finally allowed his escape, an earthly odyssey that took him through southern Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, by train and car, to Warsaw, Poland. His trip to neighboring Germany was organized by the Claims Conference, an organization that represents Jewish victims of Nazism in compensation proceedings and helps them through social programs.

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