They survived the Holocaust. Now, they are fleeing to Germany.

HANOVER, Germany – Their earliest memories are of fleeing bombs or hearing whispers of massacres of other Jews, including their loved ones. Covered by the Soviet Union, they survived.

Now aged and fragile, Ukraine’s Holocaust survivors are once again escaping war, in a remarkable journey that made the world they once knew: They are searching for safety. In Germany.

For 90-year-old Galina Ploschenko, it’s not a decision made without worry.

“They told me Germany was my best choice. I told them, ‘I hope you’re right,’ she said.

Ms. Ploschenko was the beneficiary of a rescue mission organized by Jewish groups trying to get Holocaust survivors from the war caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Bringing these undead out of a war zone by ambulance is dangerous business, carrying with it a historical irony: Not only were Holocaust survivors brought to Germany, the attack The public also came from Russia – a country they considered liberators from Nazi Germany.

A week ago, Ms. Ploschenko was trapped in bed at a retirement center in Dnipro, her hometown in central Ukraine, when artillery attacks rumbled and air raid sirens sounded. The nurses and retirees who could walk hid in the basement. She was forced to lie in her third-floor room, alone with a deaf woman and a mute, bedridden man like herself.

“That first time, I was a child, with my mother as my protector. Now, I feel very alone. It was a terrible experience, a painful experience,” she said, comfortably buried after a three-day journey at a aged care center in Hanover, North West Germany.

So far, 78 of Ukraine’s weakest Holocaust survivors, including about 10,000, have been evacuated. A single evacuation requires up to 50 people, coordinated across three continents and five countries.

For the two groups coordinating the rescues – the Jewish Claims Conference and the American Joint Distribution Commission – just convincing survivors like Ms. Ploschenko to leave was no easy feat.

Most of the weakest elderly and survivors contacted refused to leave their homes. Those willing to go have endless questions: What about their medication? Are there Russian or Ukrainian speakers there? Can they bring their cat? (Yes, as it turns out.)

Then comes the most awkward question: Why Germany?

“One of them told us: I will not be evacuated to Germany. I want to be evacuated – but not to Germany,” said Rüdiger Mahlo, of the Conference of Claims, who works with German officials in Berlin to organize the rescues.

Set up to negotiate Holocaust solutions with the German government, the Claims Conference maintains a detailed list of survivors who would, under normal circumstances, be used to distribute pensions and health care but now it serves a way of identifying people to evacuate.

For a variety of reasons, Mr. Mahlo would tell them, Germany has a point. It is easily reached by ambulance via Poland. It has a well-funded health system and a large Russian-speaking population, including Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. And his organization has close ties to government officials there after decades of negotiating the replacement issue. Israel is also an option, for those who are good enough to fly there.

Ms. Ploschenko now has “nothing but love” for Germany, though she still remembers “everything” about the last war she survived – from the scarf her mother wrapped around her, a single piece of clothing. her most, to the radio news. brought her news that thousands of Jews, among them an aunt and two cousins, had been killed in mobile petrol wagons known locally as “dushegubka,” or soul killer.

Her father, who had left to fight the Soviet army, disappeared without a trace.

“I am not afraid of Germany,” she said. “I just can’t stop thinking: Dad died in that war. My cousins ​​died in that war.”

Ms. Ploschenko believes that she, her mother and her five aunts have survived by singing – whether working in the cotton fields in Kazakhstan, where they found temporary refuge, or huddling under umbrellas in the fields. an apartment without a roof after the war.

“We would sing along with the radio,” she recalls with a smile. “That’s what saved us. We sang everything, whatever was on it – opera, folk songs. I really want to sing, but I don’t know if I can do it anymore. I have no voice for it. So instead, I just remember all the times I sang before.”

Sitting among pillows in a sunlit room at the AWO senior center, Ms. Ploschenko directs the music in her mind with trembling hands. As caregivers rushed in and out, she practiced German phrases that she carefully jotted down in a notebook: “Danke Schön,” thank you very much. “Alles Liebe,” lots of love.

“In the face of all this horror, about 70 people doesn’t sound like a lot,” said Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference. “But what is needed to get these people, one by one, ambulanced, to safety in Germany is extremely important.”

Such evacuations inevitably run into logistical difficulties with nail-biting moments. Ambulances were sent back from checkpoints when fighting broke out. Others were confiscated by soldiers, for the use of their wounded. Faced with destroyed roads, drivers instead navigated their ambulances through forests.

Most logistics are handled from 2,000 miles away, where Pini Miretski, medical evacuation team leader, sits in the situation room of the Joint Commission for Distribution in Jerusalem. JDC, a humanitarian organization, has a long history of evacuations, including the removal of Jews from Europe during World War II. For the past 30 years, their volunteers have worked to revive Jewish life in former Soviet Union countries, including Ukraine.

Mr. Miretski and others coordinated with rescuers inside Ukraine, when when helping them reach a survivor shivering in a 14-degree apartment, her window was shattered by the explosion. In another case, they helped rescuers spend a week evacuating a survivor in a village besieged by fierce fighting.

“There are more than 70 stories like this now, each one like this,” he said.

For Mr. Miretski, the operation feels personal: A Ukrainian Jewish emigrant to Israel, his great-grandparents were killed at Babyn Yar, also known as Babi Yar, a ravine in Kyiv where tens of thousands of people died after being stripped naked and shot with machine guns between 1941 and 1943. The memorial to those massacres in Kyiv was hit by Russian rockets in the early days of the invasion.

“I understand the pain of these people, I know who they are,” Mr. Miretski said. “These scenes, the stories now – in a way, it’s like life is going on in its entirety. Because many of those stories have come true.”

At least two Holocaust survivors have died since the war began in Ukraine. Last week, Vanda Obiedkova, 91 years old, die in the cellar in besieged Mariupol. In 1941, she survived by hiding in a bunker from the Nazis, who rounded up and executed 10,000 Jews in the same town.

For Vladimir Peskov, 87, who evacuated from Zaporizhzhia last week and now lives down the hallway with Ms. Ploschenko at her home in Hanover, the feeling surrounding this second war has turned his life upside down. God.

“I feel a kind of despair, because it feels like history repeats itself,” he said, hunched over in his wheelchair, stroking his mother’s cup – one of the few memorabilia he carries. to Germany.

However, he also found a closure measure.

“Today’s war has ended any negative feelings I felt towards Germany,” he said.

Just outside his room, a group of recent survivors from the eastern city of Kramatorsk were sitting around a table in the house’s sunny kitchen. They loudly lamented the idea of ​​fleeing war again. But they refused to share their thoughts with a Western newspaper reporter.

“You won’t tell the truth,” said one man, turning away.

Their hesitation reflects one of the most painful parts of this second exile, especially for those from the Russian-speaking eastern regions of Ukraine: Rethinking One Person’s Perspectives about Germany is one thing, acknowledging Russia as an aggressor is another.

“My childhood dream was to buy a bicycle and a piano, to go to Moscow to see Stalin,” Ms. Ploschenko said. “Moscow is the capital of my hometown. I used to love the song, ‘My Moscow, my country.’ It’s hard for me to believe that country is now my enemy.”

Flipping through a picture book, she points to pictures of herself as a youngster, posing in a bathing suit on the beach in Sochi, the waves crashing around her.

“Sometimes I wake up and forget I’m in Germany,” she says. “I wake up and come back with a business trip in Moldova or Uzbekistan. I went back to the Soviet Union”.

But Germany will be her home for the rest of her days. She said it was an idea that she has now given her peace of mind. “I have nowhere else to go.”