07 June 2007
Workers digging a pipeline in Ukraine have unearthed a mass grave believed to contain thousands of Jews slaughtered in Ukraine during World War II, according to a local Jewish community spokesman. The grim finding was made by chance last month when workers were laying gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, about 110 miles northwest of the Black Sea port city of Odessa, said Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community. The Nazis had established two ghettos during World War II near the village and brought Jews there from Odessa and what is now the independent state of Moldova, Shvartsman said.
In November 1941, Nazi officials set up a concentration camp in the area and killed about 5,000 people. The Jewish community was aware of the mass murder at the time, but no one knew where the bodies were buried, he said. Yitzhak Arad, a Holocaust scholar and a former director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, said the area was known to be a site of mass killings of Jews during the Holocaust. He said he found that 28,000 Jews were brought there from surrounding towns and that 10,000 died - murdered at a rate of around 500 a day.
