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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.
During the years 1942-1945, Soviet media frequently reported about the events at Babi Yar, its victims being officially defined as Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, whereby the considerable number of Roma victims was excluded.[1] 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' in general, including the Jewish population into the wider Soviet people.[2] The first draft report of the Extraordinary State Commission (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия), dated December 25, 1943 was officially censored in February 1944 as follows:[3]
| 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 publishing of the ethnical makeup of the Babi Yar victims was not forbidden, only the size of victims among the civil population was not to be mentioned in mass media.[4] After 1945, following a push for recognition by Jewish intelligentsia, the Soviet government allowed for monuments emphasizing the Jewish character of Nazi victims.[5]
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"); it is also the first line of Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 13.
An official memorial to Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was erected in 1976.[6] 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] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine issued a statement condemning the act of vandalism.[10]
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.[11]
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See also: Yad Vashem |
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. [12]
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 reinterred 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.[12]
A traffic island 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]
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.[14] 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."
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See also: Babi Yar in poetry |
In his 1961 book Star in Eclipse: Russian Jewry Revisited, Joseph Schechtman provided an account of the Babi Yar tragedy. In 1966, Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel was published in censored form in the Soviet monthly literary magazine Yunost. 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. He managed to smuggle 35 mm photographic film containing the uncensored manuscript when he defected, and the book was published in the West in 1970.
In 1985, a documentary film Babiy Yar: Lessons of History by Vitaly Korotich was made to mark the tragedy.
In 2021, it was released the documentary Babi Yar. Context by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa. The film explores the prelude and aftermath of the massacre using footage shot by German and Soviet troops.[15]
The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar has inspired artists. A poem was written by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko; this in turn was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13. An oratorio was composed by the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych to the text of Dmytro Pavlychko (2006). A number of films and television productions have also marked the tragic events at Babi Yar, and D. M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel uses the massacre's anonymity and violence as a counterpoint to the intimate and complex nature of the human psyche.