When Roman Schwarzman roars through Odessa with German guests, it goes like this: He can't stop talking at the wheel.

He barely scrapes past the curb.

The cell phone rings: the rabbi.

Schwarzman is now holding the phone to his ear.

So the right hand is not free for the shift lever, but because it has to be fast, he simply accelerates in second gear to the stop.

Konrad Schuller

Political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Keep talking to the rabbi: about the children and the elderly from the community and how they have now gotten them to Germany so that they are safe from the Russian missiles.

Then he keeps talking to his guests and can't stop.

He would have every reason to avoid Germans.

Because Schwarzman lived through the Holocaust.

At 86, he's one of the last remaining here in Odessa from back then.

Odessa's plane-tree avenues and neoclassical promenades rush by.

Only to the quays and the famous harbor steps from the time of the tsars it is not possible to get through.

Concrete barriers everywhere.

Since Russia has been shelling the city, the coast has been a restricted area.

Before the Holocaust, Odessa was the third largest Jewish city in the world

Before the Holocaust, around 1900, Odessa was the third largest Jewish city in the world.

Only in New York and Warsaw were there more Jews.

Jewish musical life produced the pianist Emil Gilels and the violinist David Oistrakh, literature Isaak Babel and his most famous hero, the Jewish bandit Benja Krik.

Then, in World War II, the old Jewish Odessa perished.

The Soviet government was able to evacuate some of the Jews, most of the others were murdered by the Germans and their Romanian allies.

Today, says Schwarzman, there are still 25,000 Jews living in the city.

He himself is deputy chief rabbi of Odessa.

He also leads the association of Jews and the former ghetto and concentration camp prisoners in the region.

In July, Schwarzman wrote a letter to Berlin.

It went to Deputy Bundestag President Katrin Göring-Eckardt of the Greens, but although the Greens support Ukraine's struggle for survival more clearly than any other party in the Bundestag, and even though Göring-Eckardt was visiting Odessa, his tone is bitter.

"They came to see us and they will be going home," Schwarzman wrote.

"Make sure your government gives us at least a chance to protect ourselves (...) We don't want to be visited like animals in a zoo that may not exist tomorrow."

Schwarzman saw his first Germans when he was five.

It was 1941 and Germany had just invaded the Soviet Union.

His father was drafted into the Red Army, and his mother, with eight siblings, tried to escape to the east in a horse-drawn carriage.

You knew that the Germans were murdering Jews, and you wanted to get away.