What Happened At Rava Ruska
their ancestors were slain, and now lie buried.
'Twenty five years ago, I learned that in Rava Ruska there was a camp where 25,000 Soviet prisoners were killed by the Germans,' he said in this village, once a thriving town with 42 per cent of its population Jewish.
'There was a memorial for the Soviet prisoners. But there were no memorials for the mass graves of the Jews.'
He had now ensured there is a memorial here - erected in May this year - and that the graves, and the memory of what happened are protected.
But it was his experience in Rava Ruska - which was also on the main railway line to the death camp of Belzec in Nazi-occupied Poland where up to 600,000 were exterminated in gas chambers - that led him to expand his search across the country.
'We want to show that we will come back.' he said.
'We will come back to the last grave where they killed the Jews... We have a duty to victims because each and every one of them had a name.'
He has estimated that there may be another 6,000 sites still to find, reported Deutsche Welle.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, he heard from Nikola Kristitch, who was aged eight in 1942, when he saw a vision of hell that haunted him for the rest of his life.
He was hiding in the trees when he saw dead children being thrown by hand into a pit - a mass grave.
Adults 'were completely naked and walked with the Rabbi at their head. He gave a sermon, to all those who were already there. And the cars kept coming, there were more and more people and they went into the pit in rows. They all lay down like herrings.
'They lay down and there was one sub-machine gun and two Germans, they had the skull and crossbones on their caps. They fired a burst at the people lying there, and then more went in and another burst.
'They kept shooting them until nightfall. And we watched. Then the Germans went back again to get the villagers to cover the grave. People hid to escape doing it. And us kids, we hid in the bushes, out of curiosity, to see.
'That night, the people covered it in, but the ground was still moving, for another two days. The ground heaved. I remembered one of the girls, a young girl. Her panties were around her ankles.
A German fired at her and her hair caught fire. She screamed and he took an automatic rifle, got into the grave and fired.
'The bullet ricocheted off his knee and he bled everywhere. He bandaged his knee, he was half undressed and then he emptied his round. He even killed Jews who still had their clothes on, he couldn't wait he was so crazed with rage. He fired at everybody, he was crazy.'
A sign of what was to come under the Germans was seen in the Lviv Pogrom of June 1941 immediately after the Nazi entered the city after pushing out the Red Army.
A Ukrainian mob, eagerly backed by the new occupiers, stripped and beat Jewish women in the streets who were subjected to public humiliation.
This was part of an orgy of anti-Semitic violence that included beatings and killings which led to the deaths of 4,000 Jews in Lviv (also known as Lvov), which is 31 miles south-east of Rava Ruska.
'The topic of the Holocaust was almost banned in Soviet times,' Mikhail Tyaglyy, historian of the Ukrainian Centre of Holocaust Study, told MailOnline.
Tags:
Picstory