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Babi Yar (Russian: Бабий яр, Babiy yar; Ukrainian: Бабин яр, Babyn yar) is a ravine in Kiev, Ukraine, which was the site of a series of a massacres of primarily Jews and some other civilians by the Germans, with assistance from local collaborators, during World War II.

Before the massacre

The Germans reached Kiev on September 19, 1941. On September 28, notices around town read:

"All Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity are to report by 8 o'clock on the morning of Monday, September 29, 1941, to the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets (near the cemetery). They are to take with them documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc. Any Jew not carrying out this instruction and who is found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilian entering flats evacuated by Jews and stealing property will be shot."

Most, including the 175,000-person Jewish community of Kiev, thought this meant the Jews were to be deported. The Nazis, however, had decided on September 26 that the Jews would all be killed in retaliation for a series of bombings against German installations for which they were blamed (though the NKVD actually conducted them).

The massacre

The Jews of Kiev gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children did not know what was happening, and by the time they heard machine-gun fire, it was too late to escape. They were driven in small groups of ten, and led down a corridor of soldiers, as described by A. Kuznetsov:

There was no question of being able to dodge or get away. Brutal blows, immediately drawing blood, descended on their heads, backs and shoulders from left and right. The soldiers kept shouting: "Schnell, schnell!" laughing happily, as if they were watching a circus act; they even found ways of delivering harder blows in the more vulnerable places, the ribs, the stomach and the groin.

The Jews were then ordered to undress, beaten if they resisted, and then shot at the edge of the Babi Yar gorge. According to the Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report No. 101, at least 33,771 Jews from Kiev and its suburbs were killed at Babi Yar on September 29 and September 30, 1941: systematically shot dead by machine gun fire.

A unit of Einsatzgruppe C, Police Battalion 45 commanded by a Major Besser, carried out the massacre, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion and units of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, under the general command of Friedrich Jeckeln. The participation of local collaborators in these events, now documented and proven, is a matter of painful public debate in Ukraine.

Babi Yar continued to be used as an execution point during the occupation. As many as 60,000 more people, including Roma, patients at a local psychiatric hospital, Ukrainian nationalists, and Soviet POWs were later shot at the site.

Aftermath and remembrance

The Soviet leadership was pursuing an anti-Jewish policy after the war, and eschewed commemorations of an ethnic nature. Several attempts to build a memorial at Babi Yar were thus overruled. The ravine was dammed and flooded with muddy water from brick quarries in late 1950's in order to fill it with mud settling to the bottom. The dam collapsed after spring rains on March 13, 1961 sending a wall of mud and water to northern parts of Kiev. A large number of people perished with the floodwaters. Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Anatoly Kuznetsov visited the site soon after the flood.

An official memorial for Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was finally erected in 1976. A memorial for the Jewish victims was placed at Babi Yar in 1991.

The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar inspired a poem of the same name written by a Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko which was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13.

Babi Yar is also the title of a Ukrainian motion picture portraying the massacre and of Anatoly Kuznetsov's celebrated novel.

The massacre was also shown in the TV-miniseries War and Remembrance.

On September 26-27, 2006, Ukrainian anarchists conducted massive protests in Kiev against the World Holocaust Forum in commemoration of the Babi Yar, claiming the forum to be an attempt at whitewashing the Ukrainian perpetrators of the Holocaust and similar genocide operations by Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the troops of Simon Petlyura.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Tourism now plans to construct an additional monument at Babi Yar to Ukrainian poet Olena Teliha who was shot there in 1942. .

References

• Kuznetsov (Anatoli A.), trans. David Floyd, (1970), Babi Yar, Jonathan Cape Ltd. ISBN 0-671-45135-9
• "Babi Yar in the mirror of science, or the map of Bermuda Triangle", an article in Zerkalo Nedeli (the Mirror Weekly), July 2005, available online in Russian and in Ukrainian

External links

• All about Babi Yar
• http://sphygmoma.livejournal.com/1056.html
• Visitors to Kiev can see a Jewish Babi Yar memorial in Babi Yar park, Kiev. To reach this park, take the metro to the Dorohozhychi station http://www.metro.kiev.ua/
• Copy of the Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report No. 101
• "Babi Yar" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in English
• Kiev organization of Jews - ghetto and concentration camp survivors: "HOLOCAUST MEMORY"
• Babi Yar: Mass Murder
• The Massacre at Babi Yar Near Kiev
• Babi Yar (Jewish Virtual Library)
• Statement of the Truck Driver Hofer Describing the Murder of Jews at Babi Yar
• Photographs of Babi Yar
• A monument is to be erected to Olena Teliha

50°28′N 30°27′E / 50.467°N 30.450°E / 50.467; 30.450

• Holocaust massacres and pogroms
• History of Kiev city
• 1941
• Massacres