‘Putin who are you liberating us from?’ Holocaust survivors brace for Russian forces

The only reason Yuri Parfenov was not murdered in the 1941 massacre of Odesa’s Jewish population is because a family hid him and his brother in a toilet pit when the soldiers came for them.

The son of a Jewish mother and a Russian father, Mr Parfenov says that day he was due to be taken to the neighbouring region of Mykolaiv and shot.

In total, fourteen members of his family - including his mother - were killed during the Holocaust in Ukraine. In the Black Sea port city of Odesa, tens of thousand of Jewish residents were shot, burned alive and worked or starved to death - predominantly by Romanian soldiers allied to Nazi Germany.

But Yuri survived and later went on to serve in the Soviet Union’s army.