Holocaust Remembrance Day is again upon us. At a time when denial of Hitler’s crimes is disturbingly resurgent, it’s a time for us not only to honor and mourn the loss of the 6 million victims of the attempted genocide — but to do right by an oft-forgotten population, those who survived the Holocaust and now live in poverty and isolation.
That’s what recently took me to Ukraine. Ukraine’s violent conflict with Russia is taking its toll, economically and in people’s daily lives. But I lie awake at night because of a specific humanitarian crisis — one that news headlines ignore and most of us know nothing about.
I traveled around the outskirts of Kiev and met one Holocaust survivor after another living in terror, but not because of war. These survivors are living in miserable, unimaginable hardship, barely surviving without running water, food or heat, and relying on meager if any assistance from the outside world.
Their stories haunt me.
In a golden economic age for so many Jewish communities and others worldwide, I wonder how is it that in the western world in which most Jews and others lack for little, how can we not know that so many aging Holocaust survivors — our brothers and sisters — don’t have enough food, medicine or heat for their homes?
Today an estimated 200,000 Holocaust survivors and elderly Jews in the former Soviet Union live in abject poverty. Thanks to more than 1.6 million donors, our organization, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, helps 110,000 of these survivors and tens of thousands more struggling survivors annually in Israel.
Yet it’s not enough.
Forty elderly survivors worldwide die each day. We must take action to help them too, before time runs out.
Typical of these forgotten survivors I met was Olga, a 92-year-old who lives in wretched conditions in a small, once mostly Jewish village two hours from Kiev. She lacks usable water because the buckets of water she’d saved from the summer had already frozen.
In the minus-13 degree temperature, Olga had no heat because she’s too old and weak to gather and cut wood for her stove. Her only food was a few frozen beets infested with maggots. To leave her ramshackle home was a luxury she hadn’t experienced for months.
I don’t know how Olga is even alive. When I gave her a food parcel, a blanket and bottles of water, she broke down crying and kissed the food for 10 minutes.
Eventually, I hugged her, and she melted into me like a child, sobbing with the last ounces of her energy.
The stories of her and many other elderly Holocaust survivors I encountered might seem exaggerated, but sadly they are all too real.
Within a decade, the vast majority of these survivors around the world will have vanished. The question we must ask ourselves urgently is what message we will have sent if they die in neglect and are buried in pauper’s graves.
Many of the Holocaust survivors we encounter were mentally and physically strong enough to start new lives, usually far from Europe, after the war. Countless flourished in the United States, Israel and other Western nations. Others, in major Soviet and post-Soviet cities like Kiev and Moscow, also started anew, in a familiar culture and language.
But others — including some orphaned during the war — remain weak and traumatized. They simply returned to their old homes when the war ended and many have never recovered. These are the forgotten survivors.
Perhaps most troubling is that survivors like Olga and so many others suffer the most from intense loneliness, with no one coming to their side.
This Holocaust Remembrance Day — called Yom Hashoah in Israel — many of us will stand for moments of silence and focus on memories of the past.
We will say important things about beating back the persistent and in some cases resurgent anti-Semitism in the Middle East, Europe and even in the United States.
That’s not enough at this point in history. We must move from memory to action to help the remaining survivors. We must act now, before it’s too late.
Eckstein is the senior vice president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.
