Death camp a sacred place for Yushchenko

UKRAINIAN president Viktor Yushchenko, who visited Auschwitz yesterday, recalled his father’s ordeal in the death camp he described as a “sacred place” for him and his family.

Yushchenko had known of Nazi atrocities as a child from his father’s account of the horrors he endured.

“My father was a wounded soldier and he was in Auschwitz. He had a tattoo 11367 on his chest,” said Yushchenko, addressing a forum in Krakow before ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops. “This is not my first time here. I came here with my children and I hope to come many more times, even with my grandchildren. This is a sacred place for me and my family. This is the place where my father suffered.”

Yushchenko’s father, Andriy - like all Auschwitz forced labour prisoners - was simply identified by his tattooed number. He was there from February to July 1944. He was also in Dachau and Buchenwald, escaping seven times.

One of a handful of some 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war to survive the camp where 1.5 million people - mostly Jews - died, he returned home after World War II to work as a teacher. He died in 1992.

Yushchenko, inaugurated on Sunday after protests in Kiev’s Independence Square backing his allegations of election fraud, said Ukrainians were all too aware of the abuses of power, citing the deaths of millions in the artificial famine engineered by Josef Stalin in the collectivisation of the 1930s.

“Ukrainians know of the danger involved with intolerance and in losing one’s checks and balances,” he said in Krakow, about 70 km east of Auschwitz.

“We came to Independence Square to defend those sacred values - liberty, human rights.”

He said on his last trip to Auschwitz he had gathered up soil which he presented to a meeting of Ukrainian Jews. “And I will guarantee that in Ukraine there will never be anti-Semitism, xenophobia or hatred between people,” he said.

“There will never again be a Jewish question in my country. The tragedy of the past will never be repeated on the soil of Ukraine.”

Ukrainians and Jews have sometimes had troubled relations in the Czarist era and Soviet times. Authorities in post-Soviet Ukraine, home to half a million Jews, have made efforts to tackle anti-Semitism and there are few blatant displays.