Babi Yar, a ravine near Kyiv, was the scene of possibly the largest shooting massacre during the Holocaust. After the war, commemoration efforts encountered serious difficulty because of the policy of the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a number of memorials have been erected. The creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was initiated in 2016.
Soviet leadership did not place any emphasis on the Jewish aspect of the Babi Yar tragedy; instead, it presented these atrocities as 'murder of peaceful Soviet people' and included the Jews among the wider Soviet populace. [1] The first draft report of the Extraordinary State Commission (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия), dated December 25, 1943 was officially censored in February 1944 as follows: [2]
| Draft version | Published version |
|---|---|
| "The Hitlerist bandits committed mass murder of the Jewish population. They announced that on September 29, 1941, all the Jews were required to arrive to the corner of Melnykova and Dorohozhytska streets and bring their documents, money and valuables. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them." | "The Hitlerist bandits brought thousands of civilians to the corner of Melnykova and Dorohozhytska streets. The butchers marched them to Babi Yar, took away their belongings, then shot them." |
The Soviets accurately reported the total number of Babi Yar dead, but they did not break out ethnicity until decades later, Even then, they did not accurately represent the number of Roma who were murdered. [3]
After the war, several attempts were made to erect a memorial at Babi Yar to commemorate the fate of the Jewish victims. A turning point was Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 1961 poem on Babi Yar, which begins "Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet" ("There are no monuments over Babi Yar"); [4] it is also the subject of each of the five movements of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13.
An official memorial to Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was erected in 1976. [5]
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian government allowed the establishment of a separate memorial specifically identifying the Jewish victims. The creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was initiated in 2016.
The monuments to commemorate the numerous events associated with Babi Yar tragedy include:
On the night of 16 July 2006, the memorial dedicated to the Jewish victims was vandalized. Several gravestones, the foundation of the commemorative sledge-stone, and several steps leading to the Menorah memorial were damaged. [9] [10] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine issued a statement condemning the act of vandalism. [11]
On 1 March 2022, the complex which includes both the memorial and the cemetery for victims the Babi Yar massacre was hit by a missile attack carried out by the Russian Federation during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. [12]
A small triangular section of land in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York City (a neighborhood with a large Jewish and Russian population), was named Babi Yar Triangle in 1981, and renovated in 1988. [13]
Alan G. Gass, FAIA, President of the Babi Yar Park Foundation that originally developed the Park with the City and County of Denver, stated:
We built a public memorial park to the Babi Yar massacre in Denver, Colorado. It was dedicated in 1983, with an inscribed black granite entrance gateway, a "People Place" amphitheatre, a "Forest that Remembers" with a single fountain jet flowing from the middle of a flat, black granite monolith in the center of the grove, and a high-walled, narrow black bridge over a ravine, all at three points of a Magen David carved out of the native prairie grasses. It is owned and maintained by the City & County of Denver. The park is used by the recently arrived immigrants from Russia and the former Soviet Union as a place of memory during the year, with a remembrance ceremony in September each year. [14]
There is a memorial to the victims of Babi Yar at the Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery in Giv'atayim. The memorial was erected over bone fragments from Babi Yar that were re-interred at the cemetery. The bones were brought out of Ukraine by three American college students in July 1971. The memorial was dedicated in 1972 by the Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir. There is an annual ceremony on Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Day. [14]
A memorial to the victims of the Babi Yar Massacre was erected in the Sydney suburb of Bondi on 28 September 2014, which has a large Russian-speaking Jewish community. The monument was unveiled by the Mayor of Waverley and the Federal Member, Malcolm Turnbull. The erection of the monument was an initiative of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and its Public Affairs Director, Alexander Ryvchin, who was born in the city of Kyiv, where the massacre took place. [15] The English portion of the inscription on the monument reads:
"In memory of the Jews of Kiev, massacred at Babi Yar by the Nazis and their Ukrainian Collaborators, and in recognition of the suffering of Soviet Jewry." [15]
The massacres at Babi Yar have been the subject of many artistic works. A number of films, documentaries, novels, poems, musical compositions, and television productions have commererated the tragedy of murder and loss.
In his 1961 book, Star in Eclipse: Russian Jewry Revisited, Joseph Schechtman provided an account of the Babi Yar tragedy.
A poem was written by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko; this in turn was set to music for full orchestra by world famous composer Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13 in 1962.
Anatoly Kuznetsov began writing a memoir of his wartime life when he was 14. Over the years he continued working on it, adding documents and eyewitness testimony. In 1966, Kuznetsov's Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel was published in censored form in the Soviet monthly literary magazine Yunost . He managed to smuggle 35 mm photographic film containing the uncensored manuscript with him when he defected from the USSR, and the book was published in the West in 1970.
D. M. Thomas's 1981 novel, The White Hotel uses the massacre's anonymity and violence as a counterpoint to the intimate and complex nature of the human psyche.
In 1985, a documentary film Babiy Yar: Lessons of History by Vitaly Korotich was made to mark the tragedy.
An oratorio was composed by the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych to the text of Dmytro Pavlychko (2006).
In 2021, Belarusian and Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa released the documentary, Babi Yar. Context . The film explores the prelude and aftermath of the massacre using footage shot by German and Soviet troops, and was reviewed favorably by The New York Times . [16]
Babi Yar or Babyn Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, killing some 33,771 Jews. Other victims of massacres at the site included Soviet prisoners of war, communists and Romani people. It is estimated that a total of between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar during the German occupation.
Olena Ivanivna Teliha was a Ukrainian poet and activist of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity.
Anatoly Vasilievich Kuznetsov was a Russian-language Soviet writer who described his experiences in German-occupied Kiev during World War II in his internationally acclaimed novel Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel. The book was originally published in a censored form in 1966 in the Russian language.
Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany took place during the occupation of Poland and the Ukrainian SSR, USSR, by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
Drobytsky Yar is a ravine in Kharkiv, Ukraine and the site of Nazi massacres during the Holocaust in Ukraine. Starting in October 1941, Nazi troops occupied Kharkiv and began preparations for the mass-murder of the local population. Over the following months, members of the Einsatzgruppen murdered an estimated 16,000–30,000 local residents, mainly Jews. Notably on 15 December 1941, when the temperature was −15 °C (5 °F), around 15,000 Jews were shot. Children were thrown into pits alive, to save bullets, in the expectation that they would quickly freeze to death. The site's menorah monument was allegedly damaged by Russia on March 26, 2022 in an artillery exchange during the invasion of Ukraine.
The Kurenivka mudslide occurred on 13 March 1961 in Kyiv, then a city in the Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union. It took place near the historic Babi Yar ravine, which had been the site of the mass murder of more than 100,000 Jews and other civilians during World War II. The mudslide began at the edge of the ravine and dumped mud, water, and human remains into the streets of Kyiv. The Soviet authorities suppressed information about the disaster, and claimed 145 people were killed, while forbidding any memorial events for the victims. A 2012 study in Ukraine estimated that the number of victims was closer to 1,500.
Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel is a documentary novel by Anatoly Kuznetsov, about the Nazi occupation of Kyiv and the massacres at Babi Yar. The two-day murder of 33,771 Jewish civilians on 29–30 September 1941, in the Kyiv ravine was one of the largest single mass killings of the Holocaust.
Ivan Andriyovych Rohach was a Ukrainian journalist, poet, writer, and political activist.
The Kiev-West or Syrets was a Nazi concentration camp or established in 1942 in Kyiv's western neighborhood of Syrets, part of Kyiv since 1799. The toponym was derived from a local small river. Some 327 inmates of the KZ Syrets were forced to remove all traces of mass murder at Babi Yar.
The Holocaust in Ukraine was the systematic mass murder of Jews in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the General Government, the Crimean General Government and some areas which were located to the East of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, in the Transnistria Governorate and Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region and Carpathian Ruthenia during World War II. The listed areas are currently parts of Ukraine.
Poems about Babi Yar commemorate the massacres committed by the Nazi Einsatzgruppe during World War II at Babi Yar, in a ravine located within the present-day Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. In just one of these atrocities – taking place over September 29–30, 1941 – 33,771 Jewish men, women and children were killed in a single Einsatzgruppe operation.
Dina (Vera) Mironovna Pronicheva was a Soviet Jewish actress at the Kiev Puppet Theatre, military communications-trained 37th Army of the Soviet Union veteran, and a survivor of the 29–30 September 1941 Babi Yar massacre of Jews by Nazi German forces in Kyiv who also worked for the German occupation.
World Forum Of Russian-Speaking Jewry — is an international, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization that brings together dozens of diaspora communities and structures of Russian-speaking Jews living in Israel, Canada, the U.S., the European Union and the former USSR.
The history of the Jews in Kyiv stretches from the 10th century CE to the 21st century, and forms part of the history of the Jews in Ukraine.
The Pińsk Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto created by Nazi Germany for the confinement of Jews living in the city of Pińsk, Western Belarus. Pińsk, located in eastern Poland, was occupied by the Red Army in 1939 and incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR. The city was captured by the Wehrmacht in Operation Barbarossa in July 1941; it was incorporated into the German Reichskommissariat Ukraine in autumn of 1941.
Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, officially the Foundation and Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, is an educational institution that documents, explains and commemorates the Babi Yar shootings of September 1941 and aims to broaden and sustain the memory of The Holocaust in Eastern Europe, taking into account geopolitical changes during the 20th century. On September 29, 2016, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, together with public figures and philanthropists, initiated the creation of the first Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. The Memorial Center is planned to be opened in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2025/26.
Victoria Khiterer is associate professor of history at Millersville University, Pennsylvania, adjunct professor at Gratz College, and a founding member of the Scientific Council of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Symbolic synagogue and place for prayer in Babyn Yar - is an art object of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, built on the territory of the National Historical Memorial Preserve "Babyn Yar" as a part of preparations to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the first massacres in Babyn Yar.
Raphael Rutman — is a Chabad Rabbi and a Shliach ("emissary") of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Executive Chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine.
Babi Yar. Context, also known as Babyn Yar. Context, is a 2021 documentary film by the Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa that explores the prelude and aftermath of the World War II massacre of nearly 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine in September 1941.
