'If this is true, then I am also a Nazi'
Carrie Davies - BBC, Uman | 14 hours agoOlga was dug out of a Nazi grave pitThe last time war came to Uman, the city was occupied by the Nazis.
Now 83, Olga was only two years old when the soldiers arrived in her village.
We are sitting around a table in a Jewish community centre in Uman, a city slightly west of the centre of Ukraine. The walls of the centre are covered in smiling photos of family gatherings and a box of matzah stapled to a display of a shabbat meal.
Olga watches the tea in her cup gradually turn a bitter dark brown. She doesn't touch the biscuits on the table. She lives just a few miles from where she was brought up.
"We were taken 5km [three miles] to a field. I was with my mum and my grannie," she tells us. "When we came to the field ditches were already dug. They began to shoot. We were surrounded by the dogs, by policemen, to stop anyone from running away.
"People started to fall into the ditch. Alive, dead, wounded. They started in the morning and it went on until midday. Then they sprinkled a little earth and left.
"Two boys, aged six and seven, survived. They started to look for other survivors. They dug me out with their hands."
Olga survived, kept hidden by a family until the war ended.
Dmytro's family lived in a forest to escape the NaziShe's one of three Holocaust survivors at the table. The other stories are similarly shocking. Dmytro's family lived in a forest to escape the Nazis. Yevhen remembers narrowly escaping from a basement when Nazi soldiers attempted to gas him with exhaust fumes. Only his mother and he survived the war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's repeated accusations that Ukraine needs to be de-Nazified feel particularly insulting to a group that lived through the occupation.
"I have many relatives in Russia. They start telling me that we have a lot of Nazis," says Dmytro. "I tell them, if this is true, then I am also a Nazi. You can kill me too."
"Putin has no business here," says Olga. "The way he mocks peaceful people is simply unimaginable." . . .
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61361827