Word: townes
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Treading across a snowy field in the middle of the Ukrainian town of Rava-Ruska, Olga Kushta says quietly: "This is where they were shot. I watched all the killings...
Sixty-four years have passed since Kushta stood by the roadside with her teenage friends, watching Nazi soldiers day after day as they led some 5,000 Jews from the town to the rim of a giant pit, and shot them in the back at point-blank range. Kushta, now 78, says she still replays in her mind the moment when a close friend of her mother's passed by and pleaded with her for help. Drawing her woollen scarf around her head in the frigid December morning, Kushta asks: "How could I save her? I was only a child...
...Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest from Paris, visited Rava-Ruska for the first time, intrigued by tales he had heard from his grandfather as a boy. The older man had been a prisoner of war in the town in the early 1940s, and had told young Patrick that horrors had occurred there. When Desbois arrived in Rava-Ruska - a town of about 8,000 a few miles from the border with Poland - to learn what had happened, "it was like a black hole," he says. "There was nothing in the books." Desbois says the then mayor declined to divulge details...
...used his dogged persistence to commemorate the execution of Jews before all recollection of them is lost forever. In late December, Yaroslav Nadiak, Rava-Ruska's former deputy mayor, hired workers to lay a cement gravestone with a Jewish star in Borowe, a village on the edge of town, atop the mass grave containing about 1,500 Jews - the one Nadiak had first revealed to Desbois in 2003, setting the priest on his long quest for the truth. On the last Sunday in December, a group of Ukrainian Jews drove to Rava-Ruska from Lviv, an hour away, and gathered...
Abdi Aden makes his living by charging tourists to ride on his large, red-costumed camel on Kenya's picturesque eastern coast. But ever since last month's fiercely contested presidential elections broke into violence, tourists have stopped flocking to the coastal town of Mombasa - and Aden's camel sits in the middle of a glistening white beach - alone...