A mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found near a village in southern Ukraine, near Odessa, a Jewish community representative said yesterday.
During World War II, the Nazis set up two ghettos near the village of Gvozdavka, and brought Jews there from all over the region, including Odessa, said Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community.
In November 1941, the Nazis set up a concentration camp in the area and killed about 5,000 Jews there, he said. Several thousand Jews executed by the Nazis lie in the grave, Shvartsman added.
Dr. Yitzhak Arad, a historian researching the extermination of Jews in parts of the Soviet Union under German occupation, confirmed to Haaretz that thousands of Jewish refugees arrived in the area in late 1941.
The grave was found by chance last month when workers were digging to lay gas pipelines in Gvozdavka. After human bones were discovered, the Jewish community requested the authorities cease construction work.
Rabbi Abraham Wolf from Odessa told Haaretz that the authorities had also agreed to give the community ownership of the land so it could build a monument commemorating the victims.
Holocaust expert Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he did not recall Gvozdavka-1 specifically, but was not surprised by the reported finding. "Discoveries such as these underscore the enormous scope of the plans of annihilation of the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe," Zuroff said.
"Hundreds of mass graves exist in Ukraine, likely with many yet to be uncovered. Ukraine is an enormous killing field, hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered," Zuroff added.
Anatoly Podolsky, director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, said there are believed to be some 250-350 mass grave sites from the Nazi occupation, during which some 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews are believed to have been killed - including those massacred near their homes and those deported to camps elsewhere.
Podolsky said most of the sites had been discovered, many since the 1991 Soviet collapse, but that there were still some left to find. Ilia Levitas, the head of Ukraine's Jewish Council, put the number of mass Jewish graves in the country at more than 700.
According to Shvartsman, the names of 93 Jews killed at the Gvozdavka site have been established. "We must figure out all their names. It is our debt before victims and survivors," he said.
Odessa chief rabbi Shlomo Baksht has voiced plans to fence off the site and erect a monument to the victims this year. Ukraine's Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust. Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital Kiev, where the Nazis slaughtered some 34,000 Jews over two days in September 1941, is a powerful symbol of the tragedy.
About 240,000 Jews were killed in the Odessa region.
© Copyright 2007 Haaretz. All rights reserved
