A 91-year-old Holocaust survivor died while sheltering from Russian strikes during the siege of Mariupol, her daughter has said.
Vanda Semyonovna Obiedkova died on 4 April while taking cover in a freezing basement without water, in a grim echo of how she had hidden in a basement from the Nazis when she was 10 years old, her daughter Larissa told Chabad.org.
Obiedkova, the second Holocaust survivor known to have died during Russia’s war in Ukraine, “didn’t deserve such a death”, said Larissa, who was with her mother at the time.
Larissa described the conditions in Mariupol as “living like animals”.
“There was no water, no electricity, no heat – and it was unbearably cold,” she said. Her mother was ill and immobile. “Every time a bomb fell, the entire building shook,” Larissa said. “My mother kept saying she didn’t remember anything like this during the Great Patriotic War [second world war].”
When German forces occupied the city in October 1941, Obiedkova avoided capture by hiding in a basement. The Nazis rounded up the city’s Jewish population, including her mother, who was taken and shot, along with the whole of her mother’s family. Nazi forces killed between 9,000 and 16,000 Jews in ditches on the outskirts of Mariupol.
Obiedkova’s father, who wasn’t Jewish, managed to get his daughter admitted to a hospital, where she spent two years after the Nazis were convinced she was Greek and not Jewish. Mariupol was liberated by the Soviet army in September 1943.
Her daughter said a VHS tape of Obiedkova giving an interview in 1998 about her life was destroyed when their home was hit. Larissa and her husband buried her mother in a public park near the Azov Sea.
Rabbi Mendel Cohen, from Mariupol, described Obiedkova as “a kind, joyous woman, a special person who will forever remain in our hearts” and who had “lived through unimaginable horrors”.
Boris Romantschenko, another Ukrainian Holocaust survivor, was killed during the current war in March. The 96-year-old had survived a number of Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, and was killed by an explosion during Russia’s assault on the city of Kharkiv.
