Holocaust Remembrance Day

The victims of the Holocaust are remembered all over the world today. The date was not chosen by chance. It was on the 27th of January that Soviet troops liberated the prisoners of one of the Nazi death camps Auschwitz-Birkenau, better known as Auschwitz.

Fresh flowers lay at the monuments in all cities of Pridnestrovie. The PMR President Vadim Krasnoselsky and parliamentarians took part in commemorative events in Tiraspol and Bendery dedicated to the genocide of the Jewish people during the Great Patriotic War. Grigory Dyachenko, Ruslan Gareev and Anton Onufrienko as well as heads of state administrations, members of the Jewish communities of Pridnestrovie and Moldova, and representatives of various public organizations.

Meeting-requiem was held near the monument to those innocently killed during the Nazi occupation in the capital. It was opened in 2018. The commemorative events are held every year. Today those who died at the hands of the Nazis are remembered. According to some estimates, from 1.5 to 3 thousand Jews were killed in Tiraspol during the years of occupation. 1300 people died where the Jewish ghetto operated in Rybnitsa, about 500 people in Kamenka, and 18000 in Dubossary. From 54 to 90 thousand Jews according to various estimates of historians died during the Great Patriotic War at the hands of the German-Romanian occupiers in total, as noted at the mourning event. The memory of them and all the rest, known and nameless victims of the Holocaust, was honored with a minute of silence.

A memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was opened last year In Bendery, at the Jewish cemetery that is already over 100 years old. Mourning events were also held today there. There were on granite slabs about 200 names of those who died in the Great Patriotic War on the fronts and were shot by Nazi SS troops during the occupation.

It is known that about 6 million Jews perished in Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, including those who lived on the territory of modern Pridnestrovie. About 12000 Jews lived in Bendery before the war, and only a few of them survived in 1942.

One of the places of execution in Bendery was a moat next to the fortress. The Nazis shot about 700 Jews there during the occupation. Fresh flowers laid down at the memorial plate today.