91-year-old Vanda Obiedkova died in Mariupol on April 4 freezing and starving while hiding from the bombings in the basement of a shop near her home.
Her daughter and her son-in-law buried her in the city park and only then they were able to leave the city.
During the first occupation of Mariupol in 1941, Vanda was 10 years old. Then she was also hiding in the basement until her Jewish mother was taken by the Nazis and shot on the outskirts of the city along with thousands of other Jews. The rest of the war until the liberation of Mariupol in 1943, Vanda spent in the hospital with her non-Jewish father, posing as a Greek girl.
The house in which she lived shared the fate of thousands of other Mariupol houses and was completely destroyed by the Russian bombs, rockets and shells, together with video recorded by the Shoah Foundation in 1998 with Obiedkova’s testimonies documenting Nazi crimes during the Holocaust.
Fortunately, a copy of her memoirs has been preserved in Israel and is already available on the YouTube channel of the USC Shoah Foundation.
“The similarities between what Mariupol experienced in 1941 and what it is experiencing now are more than obvious”, wrote Boris Lozhkin, President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine on Facebook.
Click here to watch the testimony of Vanda Vasilieva Obiedkova z”l (Russian).
