Study of the Holocaust – the systematic attempt to annihilate European Jewry by the Nazis during the 1940’s – continues apace. In honor of this Tuesday's Holocaust Memorial Day, which begins Monday evening, Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem announces the publication of a comprehensive research project documenting 101 murder sites in the areas of the former Soviet Union.
The project has been uploaded to Yad Vashem's website.
“The Untold Stories: The Murder Sites of the Jews in the Former USSR” chronicles the murders of thousands of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators in 51 different communities whose Jewish populations were eradicated during the Holocaust.
The Untold Stories is a project of Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, which investigates the destruction of the Jews of the Former USSR.
The new project began with data on all the murder sites in the former USSR that were being studied by Yad Vashem researchers. From this pool, 51 different communities whose Jewish populations were wiped out - in Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Russia - were chosen.
The website is divided into three thematic sections:
* Community - the pre-war life of Jews in each location and their fate during the years of the Nazi occupation;
* Murder Sites - the murder actions, the perpetrators and the places;
* Commemoration - post-war activities commemorating Holocaust victims.
Each of the above divisions contains extensive supplementary material, including videos, photos, maps, lists of victims, stories of Righteous Gentiles, eyewitness reports of the killings by Russians, Germans and Jews, and more.
“While the world knows about Auschwitz and even Babi Yar,” explains Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem, “more than a million Jews were murdered in towns and villages that remain relatively unknown. In some locations thousands were gunned down, in others a dozen men and women tortured and killed. This important project sheds light on what happened in these communities, some of which were a cradle of Jewish life for centuries, whose names still resonate in Jewish communities around the world. The use of all the sources available makes this project invaluable to all those who seek to know what happened.”
Untold Stories also features chilling testimonies of people, mostly those who were children at the time, who climbed out of the killing pits and managed to survive. It also sheds light on local Jews’ attempts, after the war, to memorialize the murdered Jews and destroyed communities, even as the Soviets were seeking to quell any feelings of Jewish identity.