Word: holocaust
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...stories from Desbois' witnesses have been eye-opening for younger Ukrainians too. Under the Soviet Union, the official line was that World War II was a battle between communists and fascists. The Nazis' "Final Solution" program to exterminate Jews was rarely mentioned. And although Holocaust teaching is now officially on the syllabus of Ukrainian schools, many of the nation's youth remain ignorant of what their grandparents lived through...
...According to the 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, many Ukrainians participated in the Nazi killings of Jews during pogroms in Ukraine's villages. Some Ukrainians also helped to run Nazi concentration camps. This persecution by their own countrymen left deep bitterness among Ukrainian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, says Lee Schein, 77, who fled Rava-Ruska during the war as a 12-year-old girl, and now lives in Glen Ellen, California. "The Nazis offered the Ukrainians their own state if they worked with them, so they worked with them," she says. "It is a pure miracle...
...nearly eight hours from Rava-Ruska through the countryside in temperatures approaching -4 degrees F (-20 degrees C). In the back of his rented van, Desbois pored over translations of documents from 1944 when Soviet officials went to Vysotsk to question villagers. Their report, now housed in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, makes grim reading: in 1942, the Nazis gathered all of Vysotsk's 2,000 Jews and marched them to a giant pit, where they shot them in groups of five. The report estimated that 1,864 people died on a single day, with children buried alive in order...
...them were carrying their possessions," she said through a translator. "They knew they were going to be shot." A few doors down, Iarino Hanitko told Desbois that she remembered that day clearly, especially as her parents had hidden a Jewish boy in the house; the boy escaped the Holocaust and emigrated to the West. As Hanitko watched the columns of Jews on their way to the grave, she saw some of them being shot while trying to escape...
...There was a revelation of sorts. The widow of Joseph Gat, the chief archeologist of the 1980 excavation electrified the conference by saying: "My husband believed that this was Jesus's tomb, but because of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor, he was worried about a backlash of anti-Semitism and he didn't think he could say this...