Putin’s malignant warriors murder Holocaust survivor in Ukraine

The reports are confirmed tonight, as they are confirmed every night now, in a weary, repetitive rhythm of obscenity.

Another light has been extinguished by the long, cold shadow of Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war.

The Russians have murdered Baba Zhenya.

She was ninety-seven. A woman who, as a child, was given the name ‘Besfamilnaya’—‘without family’—by a system that had taken everything. An orphanage gave her that label, and history gave her a greater one: Holocaust survivor.

She had looked into the abyss of the last century’s most perfected evil and had lived to see the spring. She had earned her peace. She had earned her quiet years in her own home, a living library of resilience, a testament to the fact that humanity can, against all odds, endure.

They executed her. In her home. In the cold. They added her name to their list, a list that now includes Baba Vanda, and so many others whose stories ended not in the gas chambers of the last century’s monsters, but in the frozen rubble of this one, delivered by the artillery shells and rifles of new ones.

Baba Zhenya (Yevgenia Mikhailovna Besfamilnaya) was an elderly Holocaust survivor who froze to death in her Kyiv apartment on January 13, 2026, after Russian missile strikes destroyed local power and heat. She was a survivor of the 1941 Babi Yar massacre as an infant.

We are told to believe in the fundamental good of man. It is a comforting notion, penned in an attic by a girl who had not yet seen the full machinery of the world. But ask those who saw the camps, ask those who have seen Bucha, ask the ghosts of Mariupol, and they would tell you a starker truth.

There is good in the world, yes. There are heroes and helpers and those who rush into basements with bread. But their light is a flickering candle against a vast, organized darkness. It is not enough. It has never been enough to redeem the whole bloody, repeating experiment in the eyes of any just god.

The arithmetic of this crime defies all morality. The life of this one woman, this ‘grandmother’ who carried the memory of a genocide within her, was worth more than the silent complicity of a nation.

Her history was worth more than their excuses. Her survival was worth more than their ambition. They have not just killed an old woman. They have murdered a witness. They have silenced a living rebuttal to tyranny, twice over.

And as this is written, the world’s attention flickers. It is diverted by new viruses, by fatigue, by the sheer, overwhelming volume of the atrocity.

Even in the act of speaking this horror aloud, another “murder theater” begins elsewhere, as if the very mechanism of the world is designed to drown out one cry with the noise of the next fresh slaughter.

But this cry must hang in the air. Let it hang.

Baba Zhenya is dead. They froze a world of memory. They executed history itself. And for this, there is no forgiveness.

May her memory, and the memory of all they have taken, be the condemnation that outlasts empires. May it be a blessing that burns.

When the Nazis came for her, Mrs Osipov handed her 1-year-old daughter Irit to Maria Babych, who worked as a nanny for the Jewish family, as she was led away in a column to be shot. Some 17,500 Jews died — half the population of Rivne at the time.

Babych, who was 50 at the time, relocated multiple times, realising that if she was exposed, both she and the child she was attempting to pass off as her own daughter would be killed. After the war, Irit’s father returned from the front and found both his daughter and the woman who had saved her. In 1949, the Osipovs emigrated to Israel and took Babych with them as a cherished member of the family. She was the first Ukrainian woman to be awarded the title of “righteous among the nations” by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.