From Mariupol to Frankfurt, the second exile of a Holocaust survivor

"I only have these things left," sighs the 81-year-old man, pointing to a few shirts donated by volunteers in his bedroom wardrobe.

This room is no longer in Mariupol, his hometown in southern Ukraine, but in Frankfurt, in western Germany, where he has been staying in a retirement home since July.

Borys Shyfrin is one of those Ukrainian Jews, Holocaust survivors, who found refuge in the country whose family Hitler's regime persecuted during World War II.

If he had "no desire" to leave Mariupol where he had a "good life" before the Russian invasion, the pensioner had to resolve to do so during the siege of the port city by the Russian army, which ended up in May taking control.

"There was no more gas, no more electricity, no water either," he told AFP, clutching the knob of his cane in his hands.

- Odyssey -

In the city pounded for months, corpses littered the streets, he recalls. "There were so many...nobody was picking them up. People got used to them - nobody was paying attention to them anymore."

A widower, this former military radio engineer lost contact with his only son several years ago. When his building was hit by gunfire, he took refuge with his neighbors in the basement.

A rabbi and volunteers finally allowed his escape, an earthly odyssey that took him through southern Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, by train and car, to Warsaw, Poland.

His trip to neighboring Germany was organized by the Claims Conference, an organization that represents Jewish victims of Nazism in compensation proceedings and helps them through social programs.

The Russian invasion was "a big surprise" for Borys Shyfrin, who still can't stomach the whirlwind of events that unexpectedly brought him to Germany.

"Before, I liked (Russian President Vladimir) Putin very much," admits the old man, whose mother tongue is Russian and who did his military service in the Soviet Union.

"Now I don't know if Putin is right to be at war with Ukraine or not - but I know that because of this war I became homeless," he adds.

- Double uprooting -

Born in 1941 in the city of Gomel, Belarus, he had to flee at the age of three months with his family to Tajikistan to escape the forces of Nazi Germany which occupied the region.

Several thousand of the city's Jews died after being herded into ghettos. In total, about 800,000 Jews were killed in Belarus during the Holocaust.

In neighboring Ukraine, the once large Jewish community has been almost entirely wiped out.

After the war, Borys Shyfrin's family returned to Belarus where he was educated before moving to Ukraine, then part of the USSR, in the mid-1970s.

The pensioner, always smiling, wants to be a philosopher: "it's life", he comments about this new exile.

But he admits feeling very lonely in Germany: "I don't speak the language, I don't understand anything, only my caregiver takes care of me and I can't even access my bank account. in the country,” he says.

Her caregiver, a young Belarusian woman, brings her books in Russian. "It's Pushkin's tales that he prefers," she says benevolently.

The Claims Conference provides the old man with financial assistance.

In total, the organization has evacuated more than 90 Ukrainian Holocaust survivors to Germany since the start of the conflict.

They are fleeing to a country which "has persecuted them in the past, and which has done everything to kill them", observes Rüdiger Mahlo, the organization's representative in Germany, acknowledging that experiencing uprooting again in the last years of their life can be "traumatic".