This week, a Holocaust survivor passed away in Kyiv: a woman who survived one of the darkest chapters in human history, yet did not survive this winter. She died from cold and hunger, a direct result of Russia’s systematic attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
In the very city where she had once endured persecution and annihilation as a child, she found herself decades later once again without heat, without electricity, and without basic security.
This case is especially shocking in light of the ceremony held this week by the Russian Embassy in Israel, at the monument to Victims of Blockaded Leningrad, who fought to achieve the Russian victory over the Nazis. It commemorates the Russian civilians who perished during World War II, victims of fascism who died from hunger and cold.
The memory of those victims is sacred. Yet there is profound cynicism in a state that commemorates the suffering of its own citizens from that era while today implements policies that bring hunger and cold upon innocent civilians in Ukraine.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is not only a day of memory: It is a day of moral reckoning. The Holocaust was a unique event in its scope, in the ideology that drove it, and in the systematic manner in which it was carried out. It cannot and must not be compared to any other event. Yet its moral lessons are clear and universal: the dehumanization of a people, the justification of aggression in the name of a distorted historical narrative, and the turning of civilians into political instruments, which are a slippery slope the world knows all too well.
Russia-Ukraine War: An assault on identity and right to exist
The war against Ukraine is not merely a territorial conflict: It is a deliberate assault on identity, on culture, and on the very right of a sovereign nation to exist. When power stations are bombed in the depths of winter, when millions of civilians are left without running water or heating, this is not incidental damage: it is an attempt to break the spirit of a people by targeting the civilian population.
Here in Israel, for a nation born from the ashes of the Holocaust and carrying in its heart the collective memory of “Never Again,” the meaning of moral responsibility resonates deeply. Memory that is not translated into a moral compass risks becoming an empty ritual. True remembrance demands a clear stance against aggression, against the deliberate targeting of civilians, against attempts to erase national identity.
The Holocaust survivor who died this week in Kyiv should not become a political symbol: She is a painful human reminder that history is not merely a chapter in a book, but can return and knock on our doors if we choose to close our eyes.
On the day the world commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, we must ask ourselves: Are we content with remembrance, or do we allow it to guide us? When evil once again raises its head in Europe, words are not enough. What is required is moral clarity, solidarity with the victims, and the defense of the fundamental principles of freedom and human dignity.
Memory must become a compass not only toward the past, but toward the present as well. Russia’s war against the Ukrainian people has already claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and this aggression threatens not only Ukraine, but may also spread and undermine the security and stability of other European nations if not firmly stopped.
The writer is Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel.