29 and 30 September 2021 marked the 80th anniversary of the execution of 33,000 people in the Babi Yar (“Old Woman’s) ravine near the Ukrainian capital Kiev – one of the largest mass murders of the Holocaust.
At the Babi Yar outside Kiev, 33,771 civilians were massacred over two days.
The Nazis captured Kiev on 19 September 1941 after launching Operation Barbarossa in June.
As Soviet explosions rocked Kiev, the Nazis decided to eliminate the city’s Jews. They ordered the Jews to gather near a train station for “resettlement” elsewhere.
The victims were led to the ravine where members of Einsatzgruppen C, German Order Police and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police opened fire. The shooting carried on throughout the day, into the next.
The scale and systemic nature of the slaughter was a turning point in the Holocaust – it was the first major massacre by bullets.
Nearly 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1944; almost 80 percent of them were shot. Executions continued at Babi Yar long after 1941: nearly 100,000 people had been killed there when Soviet forces liberated Kiev in November 1943.
Soviet ideology refused to acknowledge the Nazis’ mass killings of Jews, because such massacres disproved the politically expedient notion that the USSR’s different nationalities and ethnic groups had suffered equally in the war against Germany.
Renowned Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, a Jew from Ukraine, wrote in an article in 1943: “There are no Jews in Ukraine. […] In the big cities, in the hundreds of small towns, in the thousands of villages, you won’t see young girls’ black eyes filled with tears, you won’t hear an old woman’s voice racked with suffering, you won’t see a hungry baby’s dirty face. Everything is silent. Everything is peaceful. A whole people have been massacred.”
The Ukrainian government plans to build a museum to the Jewish dead by 2026.