It must never happen again – Mukachevo reminds

The Jewish community of Mukachevo managed to restore the cemetery, where an abandoned parking lot used to be situated, the Novyny Zakarpattya write. At the expense of relatives of the people, who once were buried there, they have built a memorial to honor the victims of the Nazi occupation. Then, they cleared the shrubs, gathered the remnants of broken gravestones and debris, arranged a symbolic burial on a large vacant lot with several hundreds of identical tombstones with the same inscription which is a short memorial prayer and is roughly translated as: "May the soul be bound with a bond of life." It is the prayer for the souls of parents, fallen soldiers and the people who died in the Holocaust. 

In the middle of the memorial, there is a large menorah surrounded with remnants of old gravestones.   At the entrance to the memorial, there is a sign with the message in Ukrainian: "To men, women, elderly and children who were brutally murdered during the Nazi occupation just because they were Jews. This must not happen again.Rest in peace." And nearby, on a high stele, there is a long text in Hebrew which commemorates thousands of Jewish residents of the city of Munkachi (Mukachevo) humiliated and killed during the war. 

It should be noted that in the late XIX – early XX century, the city was the center of Judaism in the region. There were four synagogues and nine prayer houses, Jewish schools, a canteen for destitute and a home for elderly, public house of secular purpose, etc. In 1944, after the fascist coup in Hungary and the occupation of the country by the German Nazis, the extermination of Jews and Gypsies and their deportation to the death camps in Germany and Poland began. It was during this short period when tens of thousands of Transcarpathian Jews died.