A Dose of Histoy - The Babi Yar massacre

 A Dose of Histoy - The Babi Yar massacre

On Friday, Sept. 26, 1941, when the Germans occupied Kyiv, announcements printed in Russian, Ukrainian and German began to appear on lampposts and walls around the city ordering all Jews to assemble Monday at 8 a.m. near the site of a Jewish cemetery. 

That morning, the day before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur was to begin, over 33,000 people gathered, mostly women, children and the elderly, as the Soviet government had already mobilized the men capable of fighting into the Red Army.

The multitude was marched under guard through a barbed wire enclosure leading into Babi Yar. 

Babi Yar – “yar” means ravine in Russian and Ukrainian – is actually a system of ravines, where estuaries that once fed into a tributary of the Dnieper River had left steep troughs and inland fields.

As the assembled Jews entered the ravine on that day in 1941, German SS units, together with Ukrainian prisoners recruited from a nearby prisoner-of-war camp to serve the Nazis as local police, robbed them of their money, possessions and documents. 

They made the Jews wait in the meadow, from where, behind a mound of earth, they could hear the relentless sound of machine gun fire. Over the next 36 hours, the Germans took small groups of Jews, stripped them naked and murdered them.

The postwar trial records give a sense of what occurred. 

The victims “were made to lie facedown on the bloodied corpses of victims who had already been shot. If they did not do this willingly, they were beaten and knocked down. 

Then the gunners climbed over the wobbly mounds toward the victims and shot them in the back of the neck.” According to an operational situation report the Germans sent back to Berlin, they had shot 33,371 Jews.

Over the next two years, the Germans would continue to use the site as a killing ground, murdering another 70,000 individuals – Romani people, psychiatric patients, prisoners of war, and other civilians – before the Red Army liberated the city in November 1943.

The Germans were the first to try to silence the memory of the crimes committed at the site. In August 1943, fearful of the approaching Red Army, they forced prisoners from the nearby Syrets concentration camp to dig up and burn remains from the site.

The Soviet government, too, attempted to conceal what had taken place at the site. In 1961, they tried to fill in the ravine, unintentionally setting off a mudslide that killed at least 145 people.