"The ceremony in memory of Jews, who risked their own lives and saved their countrymen during the Holocaust, has already become a tradition. It has been held for 14 years in a row. Every time we tell one more story of heroism and self-sacrifice," a representative of the Jewish National Fund, which organized the ceremony together with B’nai B’rith International, said at the event.
On June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Shmuil Pevzner served as the director of the summer camp in Lithuania's Druskininkai, where 300 children of different nationalities including 140 Jews, spent vacation. At the first hours of the war, Pevzner boarded all the children onto a train, which transferred them to Udmurtia, a western Russia's region in the Ural mountains. The saved children were resettled there and Pevzner took care of them till the end of the Great Patriotic War.
According to Russian ambassador to Israel Alexander Shein, who have attended the ceremony, none of those children got injured, despite the fact that Nazi war planes regularly attacked the train.
