A heartbreaking tragedy was uncovered in Kyiv on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, when a Holocaust survivor born in the city was found frozen to death in her apartment amid an intense cold spell gripping Ukraine.
Yevgenia Mikhailovna Bespamilnaya was discovered only after a burst water pipe in her apartment caused flooding throughout the building, with ice spreading across multiple floors as temperatures plunged to minus 18 degrees Celsius. According to reports, residents pressed police to force entry into the apartment, where Bespamilnaya was found lifeless in a completely frozen home. Authorities believe she had died several days earlier.
Bespamilnaya survived the Holocaust in Ukraine as a child. After the war, she was sent to an orphanage, where she was given her surname, meaning “without family.” She lived alone with no known relatives and spoke only Yiddish and Russian. Neighbors knew her as Baba Zhenya and described her as a quiet, withdrawn woman who rarely opened her door but made a point of attending the nearby shul.
Residents of the building said that in recent weeks they had tried to look after her, bringing basic supplies and offering assistance whenever possible. When she stopped answering phone calls and was not seen for several days, concern for her safety grew, but it was only the flooding incident that ultimately revealed what had happened.
The tragedy unfolded against the backdrop of a harsh winter in Kyiv, marked by unusually severe cold waves, infrastructure damage, and prolonged outages of electricity and water. In a cruel twist of fate, Bespamilnaya, who survived the horrors of the Holocaust, died alone decades later in the freezing cold of the city where she was born.
{Matzav.com}
Dr. Esi Sharon, the dentist who confirmed the identity of the last fallen hostage, Ran Gvili Hy”d, shared a powerful account of the experience in an interview with Yedioth Acharonot, describing the intense emotions surrounding the moment he was identified.
Recalling the instant she saw the first photograph, Dr. Sharon said, “When I opened the image that they say sent me from the open grave, I shouted, ‘It’s Rani, it’s him.’ I yelled to the doctor to enter the grave and pull out the body for final identification, which would determine with certainty that he returns home to his family, but inside I already knew. The initial image they sent me was enough for me to conclude that it was Rani. I knew his dental records and their identifying marks by heart. My entire body shook from excitement.” Dr. Sharon serves as commander of the Dental Volunteer Unit within the Police Forensics Department.
She went on to explain how the identification effort unfolded on the ground. “The engineering vehicle operators began to dig holes together with soldiers from the Search Unit, and the dentists entered them to take photos and initial identification. After some time, [pictures of] bodies that the dentists photographed while still in the graves and sent us began to accumulate. Through that method, throughout the night, we ruled out 200 bodies whose graves were opened.”
Since the outbreak of the war, Dr. Sharon has worked alongside fellow dentists and forensic professionals to identify hundreds of victims of the Hamas massacre. Under her leadership, the unit successfully identified every deceased hostage whose remains were returned from the Gaza Strip.
During the mission to recover Ran Gvili, a team of 20 dentists examined roughly 250 bodies in a period of less than 24 hours, completing the painstaking process under extreme pressure and time constraints.
{Matzav.com}
