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Mass grave found in Ukraine

The victims appear to be Jews killed by Nazis during World War II.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 6, 2007

KIEV, Ukraine - Pipeline diggers unearthed a mass grave believed to contain thousands of Jews slaughtered in Ukraine during World War II, a Jewish community spokesman said Tuesday, a grim finding in a nation that one Holocaust expert described as "an enormous killing field."

The grave was found by chance last month when workers were laying gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, about 110 miles northwest of the Black Sea port city of Odessa, said Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community.

In November 1941, Nazi officials set up a concentration camp in the area and killed about 5, 000 people

The Jewish community was aware of the mass murder at the time, but no one knew where the bodies were buried, Shvartsman said.

Yitzhak Arad, a Holocaust scholar and a former director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, said he found that 28, 000 Jews were brought there from surrounding towns and that 10, 000 died - murdered at a rate of around 500 a day.

Holocaust expert Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the discovery was not unexpected.

"I'm not surprised that, even in these days, there are discoveries such as these. It underscores the enormous scope of the plans of annihilation of the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe, " he said.

Hundreds of mass graves exist in Ukraine, and many have not been discovered, Zuroff said. "Ukraine was an enormous killing field, " he said. "Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered."

Anatoly Podolsky, director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, said there are believed to be some 250 to 350 mass grave sites dating from the Nazi occupation, during which some 1.5-million Ukrainian Jews are believed to have been killed.

Podolsky said most of the sites were located after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, but there are more.

According to Shvartsman, the names of 93 Jews killed at the Gvozsdavka-1 site have been established. He said Jewish community members planned to conduct studies to identify victims.

"We must figure out their names. It is our debt to the victims and survivors, " he said.

[Last modified June 6, 2007, 01:09:37]