Remembrance Day, rather than Victory Day, was commemorated in Lviv

On May 8, 2010, a commemoration of the victims of WWII was held at the Yaniv cemetery in Lviv. Since 2005 the Commission of the UGCC on Peace and Justice in cooperation with the Commission for Promoting Christian Unity annually organizes an event to put in order burial plots and hold an inter-religious prayer prayer for the dead at the place of the former Yaniv concentration camp and in two places of the Yaniv cemetery, namely, at the burial place of German captives and near the memorial sign for the perished civilians of Lviv. The purpose of the event is to honor the painful war years by a minute of silence and through a joint appeal to God, and to place the honor the “memory” instead of the “victory” of the war in order to reconcile people, generations, and nations. “Here are buried somebody's children, parents, neighbors – people of different nationalities and religions. With prayer we want to honor the memory of the victims, bless the future, and obtain God’s grace so that we may never repeat this horror,” said the head of Commission on Peace and Justice Lesia Kovalenko, who came to the event with her one-year-old daughter Nika (which is Greek for victory) – the youngest participant of Remembrance Day.

During the joint prayer service Fr. Mykhailo Dymyd, director of the Institute of Canon Law of the Ukrainian Catholic University, stated: “For us, Christians, the most important and, at the same time, the hardest part is to reconcile our memory – our personal, domestic, public, national, and universal memory. We see in different nations of Europe and the world that it is possible. Because, whether among the winners or the defeated, both sides are always guilty in every conflict. We need to acknowledge the errors and sins in order to be free from the past and offer others apologies and peace.” In the action of Day of Remembrance of all the victims of WWII took part the representatives of different confessions of Lviv: the Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic churches in Ukraine, the Apostolic, Lutheran, and Gethsemane Evangelical Lutheran churches, and the Church of the Living Word. Also, as a member of the organization of Progressive Judaism and a bishop of the Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith took part in the event. Thus, on this day at the Yaniv cemetery sounded solemn prayers in the Ukrainian and Armenian languages and melodious benediction in Yiddish. Representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyivan Patriarchate, Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church were invited, but none of them took part in the ecumenical prayer.

Every memorial service ended with a minute of silence and with the lying of flowers and candles on the graves of the perished. The participants also honored the burial place of members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), where they jointly prayed and singed “Christ is Risen!” In the opinion of the organizers and participants of the event, only by remembering all the victims of different wars will the public and political tension surrounding the 65th anniversary of World War II be relieved.

Information Department of the UGCC