Виступ Постійного представника України при ООН Сергія Кислиці під час розгляду проєкту резолюції 76-ї сесії ГА ООН щодо заперечення Голокосту

Mr. Chair,

The Holocaust is a tragedy of the entire Humankind – 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were killed during these dark times of modern history.

Millions of Ukrainians sacrificed themselves and made an enormous contribution to the victory over Nazism by exemplary heroism in the struggle for the liberation of their native soil and countries of Europe.

In the book of Isaiah, important to the Jews and Christians, one reads: “To all of them I erect a monument in my house and in my walls, I give them a name worth more that sons and daughters: I give them an eternal name that will never be erased”. The Monument and the Name. Yad Vashem in Hebrew.

Last summer I had a privilege to visit the Monument to the Children in Yad Vashem in Israel. The main dark room of the memorial is completely mirrored and reflects the light of five candles. The reflection of these lights’ produces the illusion of space, which symbolizes approximately 1.5 million children and youngsters who killed during the Holocaust.

As you move through the room in the light of the candles, names of the killed children, their age and place of death, are recited by a looped tape recording. The recording takes about three months to list all the perished. And you hear Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine …. You hear other names of European countries …and you leave the dark candle lit room totally devastated but equally so determined to work hard to prevent such tragedies from happening ever again.

It is a duty of every ambassador to the UN, every official of the UN to visit Yad Vashem to reflect the experience in their daily work.

I fully subscribe the worlds of Secretary General Antonio Guterres during his visit to Yad Vashem in 2017, “…the Holocaust was not a crazy initiative of a group pf paranoid Nazis, but it was the combination of millennia, of persecution and discrimination of the Jewish people of what we today call anti-Semitism.”

I thank Secretary General Antonio Guterres for these words, who was one of only three UN secretary generals who visited Yad Vashem in what is soon eight decades of the UN existence.

Mr. Chair,

In October last year international community around the world commemorated the 80th anniversary of the massacre of Babyn Yar - one of the most heinous manifestations of the Holocaust perpetrated at the territory of Ukraine. On October 6, 2021 the commemorational events dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Babyn Yar tragedy were held at Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. The symbolism of this date is that the President of Ukraine together with the leaders of Israel and Germany and hundreds of other guests from around the world were present there.

Ukraine therefore strives to ensure Babyn Yar's status as a worthy place of remembrance of the millions of victims murdered there in 1941-1944.

Babyn Yar remains one of the deepest unhealed wounds for Jews, Ukrainians, Roma, a sacred place awakening and preserving historical memory. While honoring the blessed memory of its victims as well as of all those who died at the hands of the Nazis.

International solidarity and unity of purpose must ensure that such heinous crimes against humanity will never happen again.

Ukraine reaffirms its strongest condemnation of all forms of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other forms of racism, racism discrimination, xenophobia and ref intolerance. We condemn cooperation of Stalin with Nazis regime.

We proud to co-sponsor the resolution and we find morally egregious to poison this historic moment with attempts to attack singled out members of the Assembly for political reasons.

Thank you.