Holocaust survivor Zabarko: “We save ourselves from death to life”

Boris Zabarko escaped Nazi terror as a child. The memory of the persecution of the Jews is his life’s work. Now the 86-year-old historian has fled to Germany because of the war in Ukraine.

When Boris Zabarko locked his apartment door in Kyiv at the end of March, his laptop and the manuscript for a new book were still on his desk. But as the attacks of the Russian army draw ever closer to the Ukrainian capital, action has to be taken quickly.

“I said to the end that there was no way a major war between Russia and Ukraine could happen,” says the 86-year-old historian, who now describes his assessment as a “big mistake.” Nevertheless, he does not want to leave the country at first. Only his daughter can change his mind: “My daughter said: ‘Grandpa, you have to save your granddaughter.'”

Remembering as a life task

Zabarko has already lost his home once before. In the 1940s, it was the National Socialists who established a ghetto around Sharhorod in south-western Ukraine. “There was no fence, no wall. But anyone who showed up on the street after 6 p.m. was beaten with clubs by the Romanian guards,” Zabarko recalled in an interview with the “Jewish General” in 2008.

1.5 million Jews were killed in Ukraine during World War II. He survived. The memories of that time haunt Zabarko more often now. He fled Kyiv by train: “We couldn’t get a seat and had to spend ten hours in the corridor. That night I remembered what I had read in the reports from back then.”

Remembering the persecution of the Jews in Ukraine is Zabarko’s life’s work. Since the end of the Soviet Union he has published more than 200 works and received the Federal Cross of Merit for his work. After many hours in overcrowded trains and on cold platforms, after stops in Uschgorod and Budapest, Boris Zabarko, his daughter and his granddaughter find accommodation with relatives in Stuttgart. “We save ourselves from death to life,” comments Zabarko on his escape.

“My heart is bleeding”

Boris Zabarko would probably not have expected to have to go through such extreme war experiences twice in his life. The fact that it was the rescuers from back then who were forcing the old man to flee shocks him: “It’s a catastrophe. We survived the Shoa as children. My father was killed in the war. My uncle died when Budapest was liberated. For our people in Ukraine, and especially for the Jews, that was the most terrible thing in our lives. And now at the end of our lives another big war – that’s paradoxical,” Zabarko tells dem SWR.

War is waged between people who have lived together for a long time. The images on TV and in the newspapers are difficult for Zabarko to bear. The tall man’s voice cracks: “What Putin is doing and what we saw in Bucha, Kharkiv and elsewhere is terrible. My heart is bleeding.”

Together with the Jewish community in Stuttgart, Zabarko is now trying to gain a foothold in Germany. Eighty years after the war, the Germans are different Germans, he emphasizes. Germans with whom he has already worked very well.

Boris Zabarko does not want to spend the rest of his life in Germany. “I hope the time will come when I can go home again.” After all, the manuscript for his new book is waiting on his desk in Kyiv. It should be his last.