On January 27, in accordance with the resolution of the UN General Assembly from November 1, 2005, the world community commemorates the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust – millions of Jews exterminated by the Nazis during the Second World War.

For Ukraine, this day is full of a particular tragedy, since in the dark days of the Shoah, at least one and a half million people were exterminated on Ukrainian soil – a fourth part of the Jews of Europe tortured by the Nazis.

Our nations are united by the pain of the Holodomor and Holocaust tragedies. We must remember and thoroughly investigate the tragic pages of our common history, protect historical truth and justice.

Since 2012, Ukraine has been commemorating the International Holocaust Remembrance Day every year.

On May 14, 2021, our country for the first time officially marked the Day of Remembrance of Ukrainians who rescued Jews during World War II. The special commission of the Yad Vashem Jewish Memorial Museum established almost 2,700 names of such Ukrainian heroes, awarding them the honorary title of “Righteous Among the Nations”. Ukraine ranks fourth in the world in terms of the number of Righteous Among the Nations, after Poland, the Netherlands and France.

Preservation of historical memory is an important component of Ukraine’s humanitarian policy. We have a responsibility to all past and future generations to restore historical justice. This is especially important in order to preserve and pass on the memory of the tragedy of the Holocaust, since the number of survivors is decreasing every year.

russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine brought back the worst atrocities of the war to the European continent. The war did not avoid the places of common grief of the Ukrainian, Jewish and Roma peoples – on March 1, 2022, the russian shelling of the capital of Ukraine endangered the preservation of the memory of the victims of Babyn Yar, where one of the enemy’s rockets hit.

As a result of the russian federation invasion, other monuments and memorials to the killed Jews, as well as Jewish cemeteries throughout Ukraine, were destroyed. Victims of the russian federation were also Ukrainians who survived the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation, but died during the full-scale war of the russian federation against Ukraine. Today we perpetuate the memory of the victims of Nazism and racism, in particular, Vanda Obiedkova, who survived in Nazi-occupied Mariupol, but died 80 years later – on April 4, 2022 – when the streets and houses of the city were destroyed by russian artillery and aircraft. We honor the memory of Ukrainian Borys Romanchenko, who was a prisoner of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, and was later killed at the age of 96 in his own Kharkiv apartment, which was hit by russians with a deadly weapon on March 18, 2022.

We call on the international community to join in honoring the memory of the innocent victims of the totalitarian Nazi, communist and kremlin regimes, to promote the restoration of historical truth and to bring those guilty of crimes to justice.