Symphony No.1 In Memoriam to the Martyrs of Babi Yar was written by the Ukrainian composer of Jewish descent Dmitri Klebanov in 1945. It is a commemoration of the massacre of the Jews in Babi Yar, Ukraine, during the Holocaust. [1] [2]
The symphony was based on Jewish traditional tunes. In particular, its finale was a variation of "The Mourner's Kaddish" prayer. The symphony was quickly forbidden (as part of the Soviet regime's effort to stop Jewish commemoration activities [3] ) and the composer was stripped of the position of Chairman of the Kharkiv chapter of the Union of Soviet Composers. Klebanov was accused of "distortion of historical truth about the Soviet people" (the official Soviet party line was that those perished during the war were all Soviet people, and singling out particular ethnicities was forbidden), "bourgeois formalism" and "cosmopolitanism" and there were even efforts to accuse him of anti-Soviet activities. [4] [1]
For the first time the symphony was performed in 1990, posthumously. [1]
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and thereafter was regarded as a major composer.
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, in which some 33,771 Jews were murdered. 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.
The Kyiv TV Tower is a 385 m-high (1,263 ft) lattice metal tower on Oranzhereina Street, Kyiv, Ukraine, and is the tallest structure in the country. The tower was built in 1973 while Kyiv was the capital of Ukrainian SSR. The tower was the tallest freestanding metal structure in the world It is used for radio and television broadcasting and is not open to the public. It is the tallest lattice tower in the world and sixth tallest structure in Europe.
The Symphony No. 13 in B-flat minor, Op. 113 for bass soloist, bass chorus, and large orchestra was composed by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1962. It consists of five movements, each a setting of a Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem that describes aspects of Soviet history and life. Although the symphony is commonly referred to by the nickname Babi Yar, no such subtitle is designated in Shostakovich's manuscript score.
Paul Blobel was a German Sicherheitsdienst (SD) commander and convicted war criminal who played a leading role in the Holocaust. He organised the Babi Yar massacre, the largest massacre of the Second World War at Babi Yar ravine in September 1941, pioneered the use of the gas van, and, following re-assignment, developed the gas chambers for the extermination camps. From late 1942 onwards, he led Sonderaktion 1005, wherein millions of bodies were exhumed at sites across Eastern Europe in an effort to erase all evidence of the Holocaust and specifically of Operation Reinhard. After the war, Blobel was tried at the Einsatzgruppen trial and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1951.
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.
Dmitry Lvovych Klebanov was a Soviet-era Ukrainian composer. He studied at the Kharkov Music and Drama Institute with Semyon Bogatyrev. He taught at the Kharkov Conservatory. Among his students were Valentin Bibik, Vitaliy Hubarenko, and Viktor Suslin.
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.
Ilya Andreyevich Khrzhanovsky is a Russian-born film director, screenwriter, film producer and member of the European Film Academy. His father Andrei Khrzhanovsky is one of the top Russian animation directors, and his mother Mariya Neyman, a philologist and script editor. He is the grandson of artist and actor Yury Khrzhanovsky (1905—1987).
Hans von Obstfelder was a German general in the Wehrmacht during World War II. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords.
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.
Borys Romanovych Hmyria PAU, was a Ukrainian and Soviet bass singer of opera and art song.
The Belostok (Białystok) pogrom occurred between 14–16 June 1906 in Białystok, Poland. During the pogrom, between 81 and 88 Jews were killed by soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army, the Black Hundreds, and about 80 people were wounded.
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 were erected. The creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was initiated in 2016.
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.
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.
Tetyana Yosypivna Markus was a member of the anti-Nazi underground in Kiev.
Word of the Righteous is a 2017 documentary series directed and produced by journalists Svitlana Levitas and Margarita Yakovleva, co-authors of a Ukrainian-Israeli-US project dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations.
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.
The Artemivsk massacre, also referred to as "Bakhmut's Babi Yar", was a 1942 massacre of the Jewish inhabitants of the city of Artemivsk, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. Somewhere between 1,200 and 3,000 Jews were killed or left to die within the city's alabaster mines.