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Holocaust survivor Vanda Semyonovna Obiedkova
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CHABAD OF MARIUPOL / CHABAD.ORG
A 91-year-old Holocaust survivor died during the siege of Mariupol.
She died while seeking shelter from Russian attacks.
The Guardian reports, citing her daughter.
Vanda Semyonovna Obiedkowa died on April 4 while being held out in a freezing cold basement without water.
A particularly grim death, after all, as a child she hid from the Nazis in a basement, her daughter Larissa told the Internet portal "Chabad.org".
"There was no water, no electricity, no heating - and it was unbearably cold," she said.
Her mother was ill and unable to move.
"Every time a bomb fell, the whole building shook." They lived in the basement like animals.
"Mom didn't deserve such a death," says Obiedkova's daughter Larissa just hours after arriving at a safe place with her family.
The daughter was with her until her mother's death and buried her afterwards.
Vanda Obiedkova was born on December 8, 1930 in Mariupol.
In October 1941, she was ten years old when the Nazis entered Mariupol and began rounding up the city's Jews.
When the SS came to the family home and took Vanda's mother, Maria, the little girl managed to evade arrest by hiding in a basement.
The second Holocaust survivor to die in Ukraine during the war
"She couldn't scream, that saved her," says Larissa Obiedkova about her mother.
On October 20, 1941, the Germans executed between 9,000 and 16,000 Jews in trenches on the outskirts of Mariupol, including Obiedkova's mother and her mother's entire family.
The little girl was later imprisoned, but family friends came and convinced the Nazis that she was Greek.
Her father, who was not Jewish, managed to take her to a hospital, where she remained until Mariupol was liberated in 1943.
Obiedkova gave a full account of her life and experiences of the Holocaust to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1998.
Obiedkova is the second known Holocaust survivor to die in Ukraine during the Russian war.
Boris Romanchenko was killed by Russian bombs on Kharkiv in mid-March.
He had survived four concentration camps during the Nazi era and was Vice President of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee for a long time.
Romanchenko was 96 years old.
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