A 100-year-old Ukrainian woman survived Stalin, Nazism and now the war in Ukraine. “I have survived many terrible trials in my life – the Holocaust and repression. And now I promised myself that I will survive Putin,” says Anastasia Gulej.
She was born in 1925 in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. As a child, he resisted Stalin’s terrorist regime and famine. And she was deported by the Nazis. Having survived the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. “There was no hope of living. Maybe it helped me to pray every night, maybe God helped me,” he says.
At 97, she became a refugee again when she had to flee Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After spending 15 months in Germany, she returned to kyiv. “I see that such injustices are happening in the world. When this war (World War II) was going on and the Jews were exterminated, we suffered a lot. And now people are also being killed here in Ukraine, houses are being destroyed every night,” he says.
Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, Anastasia has written several books and talks about what she experienced in her life. In the hope that one day the injustices against his people will end.
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