Russia's relentless assault on Kyiv's energy grid has killed yet another Ukrainian Holocaust survivor. On 13 January, plumbers found Yevgenia Mikhailovna Besfamilnaya—"Baba Zhenya" to her neighbors—frozen solid in her Podil apartment. Russian missiles had knocked out power and heat across the capital. Outside, temperatures had plunged to -18°C. Meanwhile, her balcony door stood open. The police didn't walk around the apartment. Instead, they drove on the ice.
Holocaust survivor in Kyiv dies as Russia's energy terror continues
Baba Zhenya's death exposes the human toll of Russia's deliberate campaign to freeze Ukrainians to death. That same week, Russian strikes broke Kyiv's energy ring and left 6,000 buildings without heat. Russia left her building to freeze among them.
Putin claims his invasion aims to "denazify" Ukraine. Yet his missiles killed a Holocaust survivor in Kyiv instead—just two blocks from the synagogue she attended.
No one knows exactly when Russia's energy war claimed her life. Neighbors last saw Baba Zhenya in early January, standing on the building's steps. At the time, she wore several robes and a sweater—but no coat. Yulia Grimchak, a volunteer who delivered groceries to her, recalls that final look.
"It was as if she was saying, 'Okay, that's it, you stay, and I'm going.'"
A life shaped by genocide
Baba Zhenya kept to herself. As an infant, she somehow escaped being sent to Babi Yar, where the Nazis murdered 34,000 Kyivan Jews in just two days in September 1941. After that, an orphanage took her in.
The orphanage also gave her a surname—Besfamilnaya, meaning "nameless" or "without family." In addition, the staff came up with her patronymic. As a result, she grew up with no known relatives and no known family history. What came before the orphanage, no one knew.
When the pipe burst in her building, water flooded her apartment and then froze into a skating rink. Baba Zhenya lay on an equally frozen bed. Novaya Gazeta Europe described her as an ice sculpture—"a monument to another Holocaust victim whom Adolf's ideological descendants found more than 80 years later."
Russia's pattern of terror against Ukraine's most vulnerable
Baba Zhenya is not the first Holocaust survivor targeted by Russia's war.
In March 2022, Russian shelling killed 96-year-old Borys Romanchenko in Kharkiv—a man who had survived four Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Mittelbau-Dora, and Bergen-Belsen. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called it an "unspeakable crime.
In 2025, 88-year-old survivor Roman Schwarzman told the German Bundestag: "Back then, Hitler wanted to kill me because I am Jewish. Now Putin is trying to kill me because I am Ukrainian."
A Russian missile had destroyed Schwarzman's Odesa apartment in December 2023. Baba Zhenya's killer was quieter—not an explosion, but the cold that Russian strikes inflicted on her city. No heat. No electricity. No rescue in time.
Throughout this ordeal, Baba Zhenya's neighbors never asked about their own water damage. Instead, they sat vigil and wished her the kingdom of heaven. That night, workers restored water to the building and repaired the pipes. But Russia had already taken Baba Zhenya.
Her death on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day adds another name to the roll of the lost. She survived one genocide. She did not survive another.
