The historicist arguments that Vladimir Putin uses to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine outrage former Soviet Jews who survived the Holocaust during the Nazi aggression against the USSR, who emigrated to Germany in the 1990s. Lithuanian-born historian Alexej Heistver, 81, who as a child underwent experiments by a Nazi doctor in the Kaunas concentration camp, in occupied Lithuania, affirms that “the war in Ukraine is a crime” and that “history What Putin says is a lie”.
Putin insists on calling the war a “special military operation” and last week he linked it to the battle of Stalingrad -which had been 80 years old-, linking the dispatch of German Leopard tanks to defend Ukraine with the Nazi Panzers that They invaded the USSR in World War II. In an aside during an act to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Berlin, Heistver told this correspondent that “denazification is a big lie, it serves Putin as legitimacy to massacre.”
Like other of his then compatriots now living in Germany, Alexej Heistver took advantage of a special German law from 1991 that allowed Jews from countries of the former USSR to enter. Between that year and 2005, 210,000 Jews arrived –mostly families with small children– coming mainly from Russia and the Ukraine, people accustomed to communist atheism and widespread anti-Semitism, people in general with a secular Jewish identity. Heistver and his wife, who were living in Moldova at the time, decided to leave after his two sons were killed in anti-Semitic attacks. Since then they have lived in Wismar, in the northeast of Germany.
Alexej Heistver chairs the Phönix aus der Asche (Phoenix of the Ashes) association, which brings together some 200 Holocaust survivors from the former Soviet Union, elderly people who in many cases are in financial difficulties. Heistver refers to the declaration that the entity made shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, still valid and that he signs as president.
The Russian aggression “is based on a whole series of pseudo-historical and political fabrications by its pocket historians, political scientists and propagandists” about “the propaganda lie that the ruling force in Ukraine is Nazi collaborators and not a democratically elected government”, in reference to the team of Volodimir Zelenski, himself a Jew. The members of the association recall: “We know from bitter experience what true Nazism is.”
Alexej Heistver has that bitter experience, which he recounted at the event organized by the Initiative 27 historical memory entity. January 27 on Holocaust Remembrance Day. He was born in 1941 in the Kaunas ghetto, the second most populous city in Lithuania, where 40,000 Jews lived at the time.
“I do not know the exact date of my birth nor do I remember my parents; they separated me from them when I was two years old and turned the ghetto into a concentration camp. They put me in an orphan barracks. Since I was so young I have almost no memories, but I do remember the Nazi doctor who came with his briefcase and would open it so we could see the instruments and cry. He tore off my bell with pliers, so I was speechless ”.
He owes his salvation in 1944 to the fact that two Jewish cleaners took him and three other children out into laundry baskets, warned by an SS guard that the camp was going to be burned and that he would let them take them away. All the other prisoners, children and adults, died. Heistver found out about it from one of those cleaners, who told him about it in 1992 when he was investigating the fate of his parents.
After some time in an orphanage, little Alexej was adopted in 1946 by a Russian military reporter, also Jewish, who gave him his last name. The Heistver couple lived with his adopted son in Moscow and Odessa; and it was in this Ukrainian city that a doctor cured the child. “I was nine years old, we had been to many doctors; he stuck his fingers down my throat and said there was a 50/50 chance he would speak again; one day I managed to read signs on the street, I saw my father cry.
Out of respect, Alexej Heistver waited until the death of both spouses to try to find out what had become of his biological parents. He discovered that his birth name was Alexandrowitsch, and that his father died in the Dachau camp, and his mother near the Stutthof camp. As a historian, he has edited the volume Infancia herida. Holocaust Survivors in the Soviet Union in Germany, among other books.