Visiting Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said November 14 that his country sought closer ties with Israel, since “we have a common bond, we are like family.” “We had a common enemy - evil, but even in the darkest days, your people gave us an example how to withstand the worst atrocities. You believed in liberty and your state and have overcome everything,” he said in a special address to the Knesset (parliament).
“In the Ukraine there is support for Israel. We have kept in our hearts the pain and sorrow of those victims of the Holocaust. We reject anti- Semitism and xenophobia and will fight this evil that poisons every good thing,” he said. “I am happy that we have begun a true dialogue,” DeutschePresse- Agentur (dpa) reported.
Prior to his address to the Knesset, Yushchenko met Israeli President Shimon Peres, to whom he handed a package containing hitherto undiscovered documents on the fate of Ukrainian Jewish community leaders and resistance commanders during the Holocaust.
“In this box I am giving you there are papers with information on mass graves of Jews and underground operatives which have remained secret to this day. There are also documents about the interrogation of Jews during this terrible period,” he said. Peres for his part said that “we should not forget the events of the past, even if they are difficult events.” One the other hand, he said Israeli-Ukrainian relations did have a future.
The documents will be handed over to the museum at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem, where they will be studied to see if they contain new information about the fate of Ukrainian Jewry during the Holocaust.
Nazi Germany invaded the Ukraine on June 22, 1941, when it launched Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union. Many Ukrainians subsequently joined Nazi auxiliary units, or the SS, and some served as guards at Nazi extermination camps in Poland. An estimated 1.4 million of Ukraine’s pre-war Jewish population of 2.4 million were killed during the Holocaust.