Krakow, Poland (CNN) --
Outside the Jewish Community Center in the Polish city of Krakow, more than a dozen members wait to greet their guest of honor as snow falls.
Out of a yellow ambulance comes Margaryta Zatuchna, 82, with a slim build, thick round glasses and an endless smile.
She is given two bouquets of roses, one orange and one white.
Tilt your head slightly and inhale deeply to smell each bouquet.
He is finally safe.
Forced to flee the Nazis as a baby, this Holocaust survivor has been forced from her home again, this time by Russian President Vladimir Putin's brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Born in January 1940 in the Ukrainian city of Járkiv, in the northeast of the country, Margaryta's life began when Adolf Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewish communities throughout Europe.
Margaryta Zatuchna photographed with her mother in 1940.
Days before the Nazis invaded her hometown in October 1941, she was evacuated with her family to a village in the Ural Mountains, now part of Russia, for the then Soviet-owned turbine plant where she worked. his father.
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"Their plant was evacuated with all the equipment to the east," she said, adding that she and her mother also left with them.
Between 1941 and 1943, workers at the plant went from making turbines to making mortars and repairing tanks for Soviet troops, he said.
"They put us in a small town with small huts, at the end of which was a forest," he recalled.
"Sometimes the wolves would come up to us, but we little kids didn't understand the danger."
During this same period, the Nazis rounded up and murdered some 16,000 Jews in Kharkiv.
Many were shot at close range or pushed into mass graves and left to fend for themselves.
When the Red Army regained control of the city in 1943, Margareta returned to Kharkiv with her family and grew up under Soviet rule.
She finished her university studies and became an engineer, got married and had a son.
She later divorced and remarried at age 40 to Valerii Verbitski, whom she described as a "good man".
His life was simple and quiet.
Margaryta arrives in Lviv, in western Ukraine, after a long journey across the country from her hometown.
"Explosion After Explosion"
That peace lasted until February 24, when Russian forces launched an unprovoked attack on Ukraine, leveling its city, bombing neighborhoods, blowing up a government building and surrounding Kharkiv's estimated 1.4 million residents.
"There was no water or electricity, we couldn't buy food. It became impossible to live," he said, "The air raid sirens never stopped, there was one explosion after another. A real war."
Weeks of indiscriminate shelling by Russian forces have terrified the residents of Kharkiv.
Tens of thousands of people have already fled Ukraine's second largest city at a time when few and unreliable humanitarian evacuation corridors are agreed upon.
A photo taken about 25 years ago shows Margaryta Zatuchna with her family.
Margaryta is fourth from the left in the second row, wearing glasses and a pink blouse.
To her right is Ella's late husband Valerii.
At first, Margaryta chose to stay and care for her frail and sick husband while leaning on a generous neighbor.
But the fighting was drawing ever closer to her home.
"An explosion blew out all our windows," he recalls.
"After that impact, Valerii went weak. It was as if his legs had been severed."
Holocaust survivor dies under Russian attack in Ukraine.
she was 96 years old
The siege and incessant bombardment took their toll: Margaryta woke up on the morning of March 20 to discover that her husband had died in his sleep.
"We couldn't bury him because of the fighting," he said.
"His body is still in the morgue."
Not even a monument honoring Kharkiv's Holocaust victims was spared Putin's so-called denazification campaign.
The menorah-shaped monument was pockmarked by shelling, with two of its arms twisted and torn off.
A nearby plaque reads: "In December 1941 and January 1942, the Nazis annihilated the prisoners of the Kharkov Jewish ghetto at Drobitsky Yar, more than 16 thousand people, old men, women and children, just because they were Jews."
ANALYSIS |
Putin is making the same mistakes that condemned Hitler when he invaded the Soviet Union.
A trip of several days
Magaryta knew it was time to go.
She contacted his younger brother in New Jersey in the United States and quickly began preparing for his evacuation with the help of multiple charities in three countries.
Margaryta talks with her brother who lives in New Jersey, United States.
"It is very difficult to see that my nice city, my beautiful city, where I spent my whole life, is destroyed," he said.
"I can not understand that degree of destruction, in what sense?".
On Wednesday, March 30, a driver picked up Margaryta in a blue SUV, hit by a previous missile attack and with plastic covered windows.
"It was a very difficult road," he said.
"We were getting information along the way from bombed places and taking unpaved roads. I felt so nauseous."
The pair traveled for two days, stopping overnight, through hundreds of kilometers of dangerous territory until they reached the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
After spending a night in a hotel, a volunteer Norwegian ambulance driver helped her cross the border from Poland to Krakow.
This part of the journey was easier, she was sitting comfortably, smiling and chatting about geography, and taking an occasional nap.
Margaryta is received at the Jewish Community Center in Krakow, Poland after fleeing Ukraine following the Russian invasion.
But his journey is not over yet.
Margaryta is waiting for a US visa to visit her brother in the United States and is undeterred by what she has experienced.
"I wasn't terrified," she said of the five weeks she lived under Russian bombardment.
When asked about where he gets his bravery from, he simply replied "it comes to me".
Margaryta insists that she does not want to become a refugee.
The survivor of both the Holocaust and the Russian onslaught hopes to return to Kharkiv to bury her husband of almost 40 years and see her beautiful city again in peace.