On 27 January 2026, lecturers of the Subject Committee for Social Sciences and Humanities of OTPC ONTU Dzhabrailov M. V., Spirzhenko R. I., Khrulov M. V. and others, under the general guidance of Deputy Director for Educational and Extracurricular Work Tetiana Kopaihorodska, held educational events dedicated to the international “Holocaust Remembrance Day”
On 27 January 1945, troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front liberated one of the largest Nazi death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
During the Second World War, 6 million Jews became victims of the Nazi policy that provided for the destruction of peoples and groups the Nazis considered a threat or inferior. About 1.5 million of them were from the territory of present-day Ukraine.
It all began in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and established a National Socialist regime in the country. This regime was based on the Nazi racial doctrine, according to which the German “Aryans” belong to a superior race, while Jews, like most other peoples, were regarded as Untermenschen – subhumans. At first the German government planned to “solve the Jewish question” by resettling the Jews in a certain area (in Poland – the Krakow district, in Madagascar or beyond the Ural Mountains), but as the events of the Second World War unfolded, the Nazis resorted to terror. It began the destruction of the Jewish people, mainly those originating from Poland, where the largest part of European Jewry lived. Documents discovered after the end of the war state that Hitler's ultimate goal was the complete extermination of all Jews throughout the world. To carry out this plan, Jews were herded into ghettos, and labour camps, concentration camps and extermination camps were set up.
Over the years of the war, the Nazis destroyed about 6 million Jews, which was roughly a third of the total number of Jews in the world at that time. It was an attempt to destroy an entire people wherever its representatives were. That is why the genocide of the Jewish people during the war received the name Holocaust (from English Holocaust – “burnt whole”).
About 1 million Jews became victims of the Holocaust on Ukrainian lands. Denial of the Holocaust is morally unacceptable, since it poses a threat to the existence of the whole world. The Righteous Among the Nations are people who saved Jews' lives. Residents of many regions of Ukraine saved Jews. Metropolitan A. Sheptytskyi personally saved 15 rabbis and 150 Jewish children. In the Lviv region alone, several thousand Jews were saved. The Germans tortured to death 100 Ukrainians of Galicia for helping Jews. Jews were saved by residents of Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and many central and eastern regions of Ukraine. Today about 2,000 Ukrainians are known who saved Jews' lives and received from the Israeli parliament the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations. The lecturers stressed that the Holocaust is not only a tragedy of the Jewish people but also a tragic lesson for all humanity.
