Family Holocaust Survivor Rescues Ukrainians
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
JERUSALEM/KYIV (Worthy News) – The family of a Jewish woman rescued from the Holocaust is now helping Ukrainian descendants of the person that saved her life.
During World War Two, Fanya Bass, then a young Jewish girl, was hidden in a forest from the Nazis by Maria Blishchik in Ukraine, Israeli media reported. That act saved her life and ensured the survival of her future family.
Some 80 years later, Fanya’s family members decided it was their turn to rescue those whose ancestors saved her life so long ago.
When Blishchik’s two granddaughters, Lasia Orshoko and Alona Chugai, landed last week at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport after escaping from Ukraine, Fanya’s granddaughter Sharon Bass was there.
Sharon, who assisted with the red tape, told Israel’s broadcaster Channel 13 that she had visited her grandmother’s grave before welcoming the two granddaughters.
She is confident that her grandmother would have welcomed them, too, with open arms. Fanya, she recalled, “always helped everyone.”
GRANDMOTHER’S WISH
And it was her grandmother’s wish that her family would take care of the family that saved her, she stressed. “Now it’s more important than ever in light of the terrible situation there,” Sharon said.
Chugai told Channel 13 that though fighting had not reached the city where they lived, they could hear “booms” as well as sirens throughout the night and morning.
Sharon said she and the women were in contact after the war broke out and decided to have them travel to Israel. “The connection with them is so strong that our home is their home like theirs is ours,” Sharon added.
They are among the more than 2.5 million people who have fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Israel is among several countries taking in refugees, many of them Jews.
As the invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed his reasoning for ousting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as wanting to “denazify” the nation. However, critics point out that Zelensky is Jewish and the grandson of a man whose family was reportedly murdered by the Nazis.
At least six million Jews died in the Holocaust, the Shoah, according to multiple sources and historic records. Thomas Graham, the distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, think thank and co-founder of Russia, East European, and Eurasian studies program at Yale University, believes history repeats itself.
He said in published remarks that Putin seems to “recycle anti-Nazi narrative” used during World War Two when Russia was victorious over Nazi Germany.
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