Cold case

The Ukrainian Holocaust survivor who froze to death at home in Kyiv amid power cuts in the depths of winter

No one knows exactly when Baba Zhenya died. They only know that she froze to death. A Kyiv native who managed to survive the Holocaust, Baba Zhenya, or rather Yevhenia Mykhailivna Besfamilnaya, finally succumbed to the freezing weather that Kyivans have been forced to endure in recent weeks.

Her neighbours knew very little about Baba Zhenya, that she miraculously avoided the Nazi rounds-ups in Kyiv as a child and so didn’t end up dying in Babyn Yar, that she was sent to an orphanage, why she lived alone and whether she had ever had a husband or children — none of this is ever likely to be known now.

UPDATE
Following the publication of this article, the Kyiv City Council issued a statement saying Yevhenia Besfamilnaya’s cause of death was coronary artery disease, which led to heart failure. Their full statement is available here.

All the neighbours knew was that Baba Zhenya was given her unusual surname — which means nameless — by the administrators at the orphanage. Besfamilnaya, which is to say from nowhere, without roots, without relatives, only with her ethnicity and native Yiddish tongue. Baba Zhenya spoke no Ukrainian: only Yiddish and Russian.

Baba Zhenya was a private person who didn’t like to speak about herself, nor did she feel comfortable inviting anybody into her apartment. She was, however, a regular visitor to the synagogue just two blocks from her home. That’s where her neighbour Yulia Hrymchak went early on the morning of 13 January to ask when Baba Zhenya had last been seen there.

Perhaps she had told them something on her last visit? Perhaps she was evacuated? Yulia says that Israeli organisations had been actively helping Jews leave Ukraine. Maybe Baba Zhenya decided to leave for warmer climes?

She didn't leave, however.

On the night of 13 January, the house where she lived began to flood. A pipe burst somewhere, and water began to leak into the building, flooding the lower floors. It was -18C degrees outside. The house would effectively have turned into a giant icy coffin. Plumbers who arrived at the scene and turned off the water looked for the source of the leak. They quickly determined that the pipe had burst on the fourth floor, which they realised was Baba Zhenya’s place.

Hrymchak is one of the neighbours that delivered groceries to Baba Zhenya. Though she rarely opened her door to them, they were able to leave the bags outside her apartment and she would collect them. Hrymchak began calling her, but got no response from either her mobile phone or land line. The neighbours began to gather outside Baba Zhenya’s door.

“Baba Zhenya was a difficult person” Hrymchak says, “Sometimes she wouldn’t open the door at all, and sometimes she’d be cranky with us when she did: ‘I’m not eating this, this doesn’t suit me, I won’t take this, you brought the wrong thing’. The police initially refused to break her door down: ‘You said it yourself, she often doesn’t open her door.’ But we were concerned. We went out in the street and insisted that they do something. It was -18C outside, the house was flooding, and we had kids and bedridden elderly folk at home. If everything freezes now, then we’ll all freeze to death. We practically forced the police to open the door.”

It turned out that Baba Zhenya was dead, and had been for some time. The autopsy should be able to establish for how long exactly. The police refused to enter her apartment, saying that there wouldn’t be a body inside if there was no smell outside.

In fact, her body was frozen; Baba Zhenya was dead, but as she was covered in ice, she had not yet started to decompose.

The pipes had indeed burst in her apartment, and a tap had come loose. Water poured out, flooded her apartment, spilled down into the lower floors and froze. Instead of walking on carpet when they entered, the police slid across the ice.

The apartment was now a skating rink, and on the equally icy bed, frozen like a Siberian mammoth, lay Baba Zhenya. That same night the water began working again. The pipes were repaired. They took Baba Zhenya away.

“I’m proud of my neighbours,” says Hrymchak. “We have an amazing community. We were all freezing, but no one asked: ‘What’s going on with the water? When will it be fixed?’ No one asked that. They all just felt sorry for Baba Zhenya. I don’t know what Jewish people say on these occasions, but we wished for her to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

“This kind of mutual support is very important, you know. When you’re fighting for survival every day, when your child shivers from the cold as you wash them, it’s very important to stick together. People do what they can. They get up and go to work with dirty hair. If you wash your hair, you won’t be able to dry it and then you definitely won’t go to work.”

“People help each other, take food to the sick and elderly, joke with them, cheer each other up. That’s our neighbours for you. We’ll bring on Armageddon. If it weren’t for our community spirit, who knows how long Baba Zhenya would have been stuck in that icy coffin.”

Though Baba Zhenya was discovered frozen to death on 13 January, she definitely survived into the New Year. Hrymchak remembers seeing Zhenya for the last time in January, when she had gone outside for a breath of fresh air before the severe sub-zero temperatures took hold.

“I remember the look on her face,” Hrymchak says. “As usual, I was in a hurry, and her eyes followed me. Zhenya didn’t say anything, she didn’t ask for food. But I could tell that she was looking at me. I can’t explain it. The look on her face was special in some way. Like she was saying: ‘OK, that’s it. You can stay here, but I’m going.’ Since then I’ve thought ‘Come on, Baba Zhenya, don’t leave us. There’s life left in us yet. We’ll win.’ But it turns out she was saying goodbye.”