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Babi Yar (Russian:Бабий яр, Ukrainian:Бабин яр, Babyn Yar) is a ravine in Kiev, Ukraine, which was the site of massacres of Jews, Gypsies, and other civilians by the Nazis, with assistance from Ukrainian 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 29th, 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. As many as 60,000 more people, including Roma and Soviet POWs were later shot at the site.
Carrying out the massacre was the Einsatzgruppe C, 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 Ukrainian collaborators in these events, now documented and proven, is a matter of painful public debate in Ukraine.
Aftermath and remembrance
The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar inspired a poem 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 above-mentioned massacre and of Anatoly Kuznetsov's celebrated novel.
The massacre was also shown in the TV-miniseries "War and Remembrance".
References
- Anatoli, A. (Kuznetsov), 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
