One of the victims of Sunday’s deadly terror attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia has been identified as a Holocaust survivor who was killed while shielding his wife from bullets, she revealed.
Alex Kleytman had travelled to Sydney’s world-famous Bondi Beach with his wife of 57 years, Larissa, for the Hanukkah event, when two terrorists opened fire.
“We were standing and suddenly came the ‘boom boom,’ and everybody fell down,” Larissa told the Australian newspaper.
“At this moment he [Alex] was behind me and at one moment he decided to go close to me. He pushed his body up because he wanted to stay near me,” she said.
Larissa’s relatives said Alex was shot and killed as he lay on the ground on top of his wife, saving her life in his final act.
“His body is still there and I am sitting there and don’t know what I have to do,” Larissa said as she left the hospital where she was taken in the wake of the deadly shooting.
“I have no husband. I don’t know… nobody can give me any answers,” she told reporters, clearly still in shock.
At least 15 people were killed and 29 wounded in the shooting at Bondi Beach, where around 2,000 people had gathered to mark the first day of Hanukkah.
Larissa, a fellow Holocaust survivor, met her husband in their native Ukraine before the pair moved to Australia, living for many years in the southeastern Sydney suburbs.
Alex worked as a civil engineer.
They recounted their traumatic early experiences during the Second World War in a 2023 interview with the Australian Jewish charity JewishCare.
“As children, both Larisa and Alexander faced the unspeakable terror of the Holocaust. Alex’s memories are particularly harrowing; recalling the dreadful conditions in Siberia where he, along with his mother and younger brother, struggled for survival,” the charity said in that year’s annual report.
“The scars of the past, however, did not deter them from seeking a brighter future. They later made the move to Australia, immigrating from Ukraine,” the report continued.
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