Some 65 Years Later, Few Can Recall Babi Yar's Gruesome Details

Vladimir Matveyev
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

KIEV, Ukraine

Babi Yar, a deep ditch located on the outskirts of Kiev, symbolizes one of the worst massacres to take place during World War II -- yet some young Ukrainians have never heard about the place.

"I know nothing about that ravine. Probably some people were killed there, but I'm not sure who, by whom and when," said Anna, 21, asked this week near the site where some 33,000 Jews were killed between Sept. 29-30, 1941 -- and an estimated 100,000 were shot and their bodies burnt during the 1941-1943 Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

Mourners gather in Kiev on Sept. 27 at the Ukrainian nationalist monument dedicated to victims of the Babi Yar massacre.

The Sept. 30 high-profile commemoration in Kiev, marking the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy, was aimed at educating young Ukrainians like her.

At the invitation of Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko, international leaders and Jewish officials and activists from 41 countries attended the two-day events, which included an exhibition, a memorial ceremony at the site and a conference titled "Let My People Live."

Most speakers at the ceremony and conference spoke about how to turn the memory of Babi Yar into an educational lesson.

"The Holocaust and Babi Yar killings wounded our nations. Babi Yar should be that injection preventing aggressive bloody xenophobia," Yuschenko said at the opening ceremony of the exhibition.

Then, speaking at the conference, he added, "I clearly and straightforwardly promise that there will never be ethnic intolerance and religious hatred in Ukraine. Like all Ukrainians, I refuse to accept and tolerate the slightest manifestation of xenophobia and anti-Semitism."

Israeli President Moshe Katsav also said that people must never forget the Holocaust: "We must pass on the memory of the Holocaust to the young for the sake of posterity, and to preserve kindness and human values."

Yuschenko, joined by Ukrainian officials and the leaders of foreign delegations, placed candles at the memorial. That was followed by prayers conducted by Christian clerics and Jewish rabbis. Hundreds of mourners -- many of them Jews from around the world -- watched, some holding red and white carnations. Still others carried small stones, which Jews traditionally leave at grave sites.

Last week's events in Kiev were the brainchild of Russian Jewish leader and business magnate Vyacheslav "Moshe" Kantor. He said that the idea came to him a few years ago, when on a visit to Kiev he noticed a group of young boys playing soccer near the site of the massacre.

"Most people today simply don't know what happened there," said Kantor, who is founder of the World Holocaust Forum, president of the Russian Jewish Congress and chairman of the Board of Governors of the European Jewish Congress.

Kantor and other organizers hope the widely covered events will help to overcome that ignorance, which is a legacy of the Soviet era, when any references to the specific Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust were avoided.

In the years since Ukrainian independence in 1991, no major government-sponsored events have taken place at Babi Yar, with the exception of a few state visits to Kiev by Israeli and U.S. leaders.

Even the recent main events took place at a monument to all of Babi Yar's victims, not near the Jewish one -- a 10-foot menorah that Jewish groups erected at Babi Yar in 1991.

Some Ukrainian officials who attended the ceremony said that tributes to victims of Babi Yar should take place regularly to educate all Ukrainians, especially the younger generations so far removed from that time and place.

'People Must Remember'
"We must regularly commemorate the Babi Yar victims because people must remember this tragedy," said Alexander Moroz, speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament. "This is a grave for the victims of different nationalities, but only Jews were killed only because they were Jews."

Thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, large numbers of the Ukrainian national resistance movement, Communists, gypsies and mentally disabled persons were also killed at Babi Yar.

Others said that it was hard for Ukrainians to remember the killings apart from another catastrophe for Ukraine -- a Soviet-induced famine, known as the Holodomor, that took millions of lives in 1932-1933.

Babi Yar, explained Ukraine's minister of interior affairs, Yuriy Lutsenko, "is our tribute to the tragedy suffered by people in Ukraine. I personally do not separate the Holocaust [from the famine].

"It doesn't matter how many people were killed," he emphasized, "because even one man is important for us."