Kraszczyk Avenue is Kiev's Champs-Elysees.
If you want to advertise, this is where billboards are placed.
If you want to tell a story on signs - this is the natural choice.
A street cleaner, not young, in yellow overalls, stopped sweeping the streets of the boulevard yesterday morning to read with great interest what appeared on the new signs that hung in the place.
Her expression closed surprise, interest, shock, curiosity, and perhaps all together, from a horrific historical event that occurred just a few miles from here, northwest of where she and I are: the killing valley where between 100,000 and 150,000 people were slaughtered, 50,000 of them Jews.
Babi Yar.
A place that has become synonymous with hell for an entire people, a place where 33,000 Jews were systematically murdered in two days, en masse, before the gas age - in one bullet.
Kill and save bullets.
Massacre with a bullet.
And this did not happen a thousand years ago, but from the end of September 1941. Yesterday in terms of the schedule of mankind.
Boaz Bismuth, editor of "Israel Today", Photo: Arik Sultan
For many years there were no bullets, no names, no graves and no monuments to testify.
The victims were eliminated once again.
The Nazis massacred, Ukrainians during the war helped and the Soviets blurred.
In the historical display set up on the boulevard, passers-by could be impressed by the historical signs, in which Soviet propaganda is clearly visible: Jews in the form of Nazis in front of the "Greater Israel" project.
Instead of commemoration - slander.
and not only.
Three hours after the meeting on the boulevard with a horrific historical chapter - I am somewhere else in our Jewish history: Yitzhak Bozi Herzog, the president of the Jewish state, the son of a president and the grandson of a great rabbi, is received with honor and splendor in the palace of the President of Ukraine.
The Holocaust and the Resurrection in one morning.
This is our wonderful story.
The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zalansky, said yesterday in a joint statement with President Herzog that Ukraine is passing a law against anti-Semitism, and Herzog mentioned that it boycotted the Durban Conference.
This is very important - but it is not enough.
Ukraine should not be afraid to confront its past, and with the help of proper education in schools it should make clear to the younger generation what the antisemitic chapter was of some of the people of Ukraine, including some of its heroes.
Chirac's France did this after President Mitterrand's refusal, when it acknowledged Vichy regime crimes during the Nazi occupation - and it only added respect to it.
Visitors to Babi Yar // Photo: AFP,
Yesterday, together with Ariel Bolstein we sent to Kiev, we sat down with a local young woman, Lana, a producer of conferences and events.
An intelligent girl, a graduate of the humanities at the University of Kiev.
She explained to us that the Cossacks were not anti-Semitic, and that the tyrant Bogdan Khmelnytsky was not anti-Semitic.
History shows dark chapters in the attitude of the Cossacks towards the Jews, and Khmelnytsky himself, one of the fathers of the idea of Ukrainian nationalism and the leader of the Cossack revolt against the Poles, was responsible for the decrees of 1918 and 1919, and the killing of thousands of Jews.
President Yitzhak Herzog lands in Kiev, Photo: Haim Tzach / GPO
Ukraine should not be afraid to confront the dark episodes in which Ukrainians were involved.
Yesterday's visit and the way Ukraine marks the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, illustrate how much Ukraine is heading in the right direction as a country.
Whoever said that history is written in the ink of the past was right.
In Babi Yar's case it's not ink, it's blood.
Meanwhile, when you hear some of the young people here explaining that what we perceive as anti-Semitism is none other than their love of their country, a kind of nationalism - you realize that we and the citizens of the world do not exactly speak the same language. And perhaps that is why some argue that anti-Semitism is part of general racism or another form of hatred of the other, to speak to the hearts of the citizens of the world and young people today, and there are those like me who believe that just like the Babi Yar massacre, Jewish uniqueness is of great importance. That is why it is so important to emphasize - of course there is racism and xenophobia in the world, but there is one aimed at Jews - and precisely because of this it is so important that they have a Jewish home in a Jewish state. And to those who are engaged in the craft, in the craft of commemoration - just bless them and tell them what they know: their craft is eternal and will never end. Companies and countries will seek to blur - like the Soviets - and we will always insist on mentioning.
I was reminded yesterday of the Boal d'Ave in France, where former French President Francois Hollande mentioned how French policemen - not Germans - persecuted and concentrated the Jews of Paris in 1942 at the same site, and sent them from there to their deaths in the camps.
Today we will participate in the important text in the Valley of Killing.
For the sake of the victims, for the sake of their relatives, for the sake of all humanity - Ukraine needs to tell the world the whole story.
Today's event in Kiev adds respect to Ukraine.