Holocaust commemorated in Ukraine, Romania, Czech Republic
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Monday, 10 October 2005
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By News agencies
Hundreds of Jews lit candles and prayed Sunday near the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, where the Nazis killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews during World War II, as Jewish leaders expressed concern over recent anti-Semitic acts in the former Soviet republic.
The commemoration at the edge of the ravine followed 10 days after an official ceremony marking 64 years since the massacre, which began on September 29, 1941, when Nazi forces occupying Kiev marched local Jews to the brink of the ravine and shot them.
"The official commemoration looks like a political rally, so we Jews alone gather here separately for years," said Ukraine's chief rabbi, Yakov Blaikh, standing near a modest sculpture of a menorah near the edge of the ravine - a mile from the huge Soviet-era monument to Babi Yar victims that is the site of official annual ceremonies.
Leaning against a crutch on the brink of the ravine, Leya Osadcha, 79, lit candles in memory of 16 relatives who died here. She said she watched from behind some trees as the Nazis gunned their victims down.
"My mother sent me, then a 15-year-old girl, to a nearby village to trade clothes for some food. When I came back, our neighbors told me Nazi forces occupying Kiev ordered people to gather and bring their warm clothes and valuables - as if they were to be deported," Osadcha said. "I ran to catch up with my family but I was too late. So I survived."
More than 33,700 Jews were killed over just a few days at Babi Yar, and within months the toll is believed to have reached more than 100,000, including thousands of Red Army prisoners of war and resistance fighters.
Decades later, Blaikh criticized today's Ukrainian authorities for doing too little to combat anti-Semitism.
"I wont keep silence, I wont let people forget, as rabbi, Jew and a man who believes in democracy, freedom of speech and religion," Blaikh said.
Romania remembers Holocaust victims
Romania held a Holocaust Remembrance Day Sunday, to honor the memories of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Gypsies who were persecuted by the country's pro-Nazi regime during World War II.
During a ceremony in the city of Iasi, the site of an anti-Jewish pogrom in June 1941 in which 14,850 Jews were killed, Foreign Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu said the government would work to educate the young so that such things would never happen again.
"During 1938-1944 in Romania, Jews were persecuted, they were killed, and intolerance, hate and lack of understanding toward their culture and religion were the engines of these crimes," he said.
Ungureanu also took part in the opening of a Jewish Studies Center at the local Alexandru Ioan Cuza University.
On October 9, 1941, the Nazi-allied government led by Marshal Ion Antonescu began deporting Jews to camps located in Transnistria, an occupied area in the former Soviet Union. Less than a year later, the government began deporting Gypsies to camps in the same region.
An international panel of historians set up last year said the wartime regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu was responsible for the deaths of up to 380,000 Jews and more than 11,000 Gypsies.
Czech memorial unveiled
Also on Sunday, a Holocaust memorial consisting of a half-buried Jewish Star of David was dedicated in the Czech city of Usti nad Labem.
The work by the sculptor Michal Gabriel along with others were commissioned by the north Bohemian city in order "to renew the memory" of the wartime Holocaust, the city's mayor Petr Candalovic said.
The dedication of the memorial was a part of a conference called "the Spirit of the Founders" dealing with the German and Jewish roots of the city.
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