The exhibition named “Triumph of a Person. Ukrainian Citizens Who Survived in Nazi Concentration Camps” has been opened.
The exposition is exhibited on 22 Khreschatyk St. near the main post office. More than 20 stands narrate about 30 human lives in 11 camps of the Third Reich, an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent reported.
As noted in the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, natives of Ukraine were in Auschwitz, in Buchenwald, in Dachau, in Ravensbruck, and in other concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
“They vanished into the vast majority of various national groups of “Russians” (citizens of the USSR),”Poles”, “Hungarians,” “Romanians.” Due to the fact that Ukraine was not independent, we do not know about the exact number of our compatriots who went through the Nazi “mills of death.” But the Ukrainian dimension of concentration camps illustrates the fate of Ukrainian prisoners,” the Ukrainian National Remembrance Institute said.
The stories shown in the exhibition tell us that many Ukrainians did not want to put up with the role of passive slaves of Nazism – in camps they formed networks of mutual aid and underground organizations, even in seemingly hopeless conditions they decided on escapes, riots and uprisings, were ready to walk thousands of kilometers to return to their homeland.
The opening ceremony was attended by Culture Minister of Ukraine Yevhen Nishchuk and UINR Director Volodymyr Viatrovych. Authors of the exhibition are Ihor Behun, Volodymyr Birchak, Olesia Isayuk.
According to UINR, after the Second World War, the League of Ukrainian Political Prisoners found out that the Ukrainians were in 26 concentration camps and their branches. According to rough estimates of the League, in Buchenwald as of 1942 there were 5,000 Ukrainians among 15,000 citizens of the USSR. In early 1943, Ukrainians constituted 15 percent of Majdanek’s captives. Historians say about 110,000 people from Ukraine who were deported to the concentration camp of Auschwitz: 15,000 Red Army soldiers, 95,000 Jews from Zakarpattia and about 600 members of the Voluntary Movement of the OUN.
