Honoring the feat of humanity and selfless sacrifice by the State of Israel to honor non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust of the WWII (1939-1945), the honorary title "Righteous Among the Nations" was established in 1953. Practical filling of the list of "righteous people of the world" began in 1963. Today, Ukraine is the fourth country in the world after Poland, the Netherlands and France in terms of the number of "righteous people of the world" from more than 50 countries with a quantitative indicator of about 3,000 individuals. In our country, by a resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, starting in 2021, the Day of Remembrance of Ukrainians who saved Jews from the Nazi extermination policy was established on May 14 every year.
Prominent Ukrainian human rights writer Volodymyr Korolenko did not live to see the horrors of the WWII. However, his conscious life activity falls on the tumultuous break of two centuries - the end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th. With his writings and practical actions as a public human rights defender, the writer fought against all manifestations of anti-Semitism both during the empire and after its collapse in 1917-1921. Volodymyr Korolenko's decisive statements against chauvinism and Jewish pogroms went down in the history of condemnation of inter-ethnic enmity. The Jewish theme and the Jewish question resonated throughout Korolenko's life. He works on them in various genres: short stories, essays, journalistic articles, and also fights pogroms and slanders, cares for the arrested, and saves people's lives.
The NGO "Jewish Council of Ukraine", which since 1988 unites about 200 Jewish organizations of the country, in 1998, taking into account the great personal role in protecting the rights and dignity of representatives of the Jewish nationality, awarded Volodymyr Korolenko the honorary title "Righteous One of Ukraine". In the Poltava Literary and Memorial Museum of the writer, the decree on the awarding of an honorary title is preserved, as well as letters of thanks that Volodymyr Korolenko received during his lifetime: from the Jewish public library, Jewish scouts, and the Jewish community. For a humanist writer, the life of every person is the highest value! Over the course of ten years of public activity, Volodymyr Korolenko saved more than a hundred lives of both Poltava residents and compatriots.
