Holocaust Survivor Warns Putin Seeks to Kill Him Amid Russian Attacks in Odessa
Roman Schwartzman, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor from the Bershad ghetto, is once again facing deadly threats in Odessa, Ukraine, as Russia launches lethal drone attacks on the city and its nearby port. In an interview with the British Jewish newspaper Jewish Chronicle, interrupted by air raid sirens and nearby explosions, Schwartzman drew chilling parallels between the Nazi persecutions of his childhood and the current Russian aggression.
Schwartzman’s early life was marked by extreme hardship: born into a poor family of nine children, his father was conscripted into the Red Army in 1941, and his mother fled German and Romanian forces who had encircled their area with barbed wire. At age four, he was forced to work on construction sites and streets, while his 14-year-old brother Joseph was shot by captors after falling through ice while repairing a bridge. Schwartzman recalled harrowing memories of severe hunger and begging for scraps of food.
In 2023, he narrowly survived a Russian drone strike that shattered the windows and destroyed his home as he tried to flee to a basement. He described modern Ukraine and the freedom to live openly as a Jew as a paradise compared to the past but sharply criticized the world for insufficient action, warning that Putin is the Hitler of today. Approaching his 90th birthday in two months, Schwartzman hopes for an end to the war and cherishes seeing his grandson recently married and working as a doctor.
The Bershad ghetto, established by Romanian occupation authorities in Transnistria during World War II, imprisoned about 20,000 Jews, of whom approximately 15,000 died from disease, cold, and starvation between late 1941 and March 1944, when the Red Army liberated the area. Schwartzman’s survival echoes other tragic stories of Holocaust survivors who perished in recent Russian attacks, such as Boris Romantschenko, who died in a 2022 Russian bombing in Kharkiv, and Wanda Obydkova, who fled Nazi capture in Mariupol in 1941 and died in a Russian bombing shelter there in 2022. These accounts highlight the grim irony of Holocaust survivors, once saved by Soviet forces, now being killed by their descendants amid Russia’s war to destroy Ukraine, mirroring Nazi atrocities from eighty years ago.
