In an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman published on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of his family who perished in the Holocaust and his grandfather, Semyon Ivanovich Zelensky, the sole survivor in his family, who fought in the Red Army against the Nazis in World War II.

“My grandfather, he graduated from the military academy, and from the very beginning of the war, he went to fight. He was in the infantry and he fought through the entire war. He had many wounds, as they used to say back then, ‘His chest is covered in medals,’ and it’s true,” Zelensky told Fridman during their discussion, which also covered the Russia-Ukraine war, President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration and prospects for peace between Russia and Ukraine.

“He didn’t like to tell details about the war. He never boasted, although I asked him as a boy would, ‘How many fascists did you kill?’ He never talked about it,” Zelensky continued. “He believed that the war was a great tragedy — a tragedy for everyone. And Ukraine was occupied, and it was a tragedy for Ukraine, a tragedy for Europe, and a tragedy for the Jewish people.”

“His own brothers, his entire family were executed. They were tortured by fascists who had occupied Ukraine and their village. His father was the head of the village and he was killed. They were shot. It was a mass … A mass grave, right? Yes. It was a communal burial,” Zelensky said. “Some of them were killed outright and others, they were buried alive. His four brothers, they all went to war. As soon as the war began, they were all there. He was the only one who had a military education, and they all died in the war. He was the only one who came back. He had nobody.”

Shortly before Zelensky took office in May 2019, on Victory Day in Ukraine, he visited his grandfather’s grave in his hometown, Kryvyi Rih, and honored the memory of the veterans who defended their country from the Nazis.

Looking back at WWII through the lens of his country’s current war with Russia, Zelensky told Fridman, “I think it’s hard to understand why nobody wants to listen, look at and analyze history. War, the rise of fascism and Nazism, the emergence of Hitler, Goebbels, and their entire team at the time, this wasn’t just about one party or even one country. It was essentially a wave. A wave of hatred, a wave of one race, one race above the rest.”

“They were in fact constructing and ultimately implemented a theory around this idea later seizing Europe,” Zelensky added. “They created a theory of one nation, one race, one world, their world. Of course, this idea is absolutely senseless, but it has become radicalized over the years and even gained support. A vision of one world and in principle, the so-called Russian World, the ideology Putin promotes and imposes, it wasn’t originally like that. He was a different person back then, or maybe he was always like this, but his rhetoric was different.“