( CNN ) One war was enough for Gregory Margolin . Now 87 years old , he was a 16-year-old Jewish recruit when he fought in the Soviet Red Army . As he fought the Nazis in World War II , his family fled . `` I did not show that I was Jewish , '' Margolin says . `` But it did not matter because people were being killed left and right . All around me . '' This year , in Ukraine , he found himself again surrounded by war . Margolin was a sniper who rose to be a commander in the army . His old uniform is still adorned with medals from his time in the military . His granddaughter Liora still marvels at his stories from the war . She is amazed that he managed to survive . Suffering from Alzheimer 's disease , a degenerative condition that impairs memory , he struggles to remember his own life sometimes , but he remembers the horrors of war . His eyes slowly shift back and forth as he seeks the right word . Or perhaps the right memory . His hands shake ever so slightly . It seems he knows he has lived a life . He is just trying to remember all the details . `` People were hiding in shelters under the ground , '' Liora says of the stories Margolin once told . `` They were being shot at point blank range . It was terrible . '' `` [ The Nazis ] would have erased us from the Earth , '' Margolin remembers . `` They attacked us and we fought back . '' After the war , Margolin settled in Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine . His family grew . He built a life . Then , decades later , he found himself in the middle of a war once again . `` A missile fell and the house was destroyed . We were attacked , '' Margolin says . `` A missile fell . I remember . '' Margolin 's family lived in a neighborhood next to the Donetsk airport , near some of the most intense fighting in Eastern Ukraine as pro-Russian separatists battled the Ukrainian army . Margolin , who had survived one war , was able to survive another , even as the stray missile hit his house on February 10 . It spared him , but it killed his daughter Ira . `` The moment it happened , we decided that 's it . Here and now , we 're moving to Israel , '' says Liora . `` This is the safest place . '' Margolin arrived in Israel on March 24 . Asked why the family waited to leave the war-torn region of Eastern Ukraine , Liora says they felt they would be fine in Donetsk , while Liora prayed for their safety from Israel . `` No matter how much we 're afraid of the next war here and as much as it 's not quiet here , it is the quietest place . '' Margolin came over in a wave of Ukrainian Jewish immigration to Israel that coincided with the beginning of hostilities in Eastern Ukraine . The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews , an organization that works to build interfaith understanding and support for Israel , has brought 600 Jews to Israel since December , Margolin among them . Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein , the fellowship 's founder , says , `` We set up a refugee center . It 's the first time since the Holocaust that the Jewish world has had to set up a refugee center for these Jews who are fleeing and have nowhere to go . '' Among the Ukrainian Jews moving to Israel , Eckstein says they have worked with approximately a dozen Holocaust survivors . On Yom HaShoah , Israel 's Holocaust Remembrance Day that commemorates the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews , these stories of survival reverberate with a renewed energy . Jews who struggled to survive once find themselves fleeing to survive now . `` Most of the [ Jewish ] people in the Ukraine are Holocaust survivors or children of Holocaust survivors . These are the people who made it , who are able to flee or come back or to stay or to somehow survive the Holocaust . '' Margolin was one of these people , able to survive the Holocaust as a soldier in the Soviet Army . His story can be difficult for him to remember sometimes , but it is impossible for his family to forget . The voices of Auschwitz .
International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has brought 600 Jews to Israel since March 24 . The Margolin family is among them ; their home in Eastern Ukraine was bombed .