Memorial site launched at Babi Yar killing ground

• Author: ORI LEWIS
• Published date: 06 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

As many as 150,000 people – Ukrainians, Roma, Soviets and the physically and mentally disabled – were murdered over a longer period, making it Europe's largest mass grave.

The Babyn Yar site is currently a suburban public park where children play and people may sit on a bench to enjoy a few beers, and aside from a few monuments that can easily be overlooked, there is little to suggest that the verdant area was the site of the largest mass murder in Europe, where the Nazis perpetrated some of their most brutal crimes.

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The Soviet regime under Stalin then added another layer of criminality by trying to erase the memory of what happened at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar in Russian), suppressing the terrible plight of the Jews because of the complicity of some of its own citizens in the shootings.

Presidents Isaac Herzog, Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany attended, alongside the private funders of the project and a number of prominent figures, current and former politicians and leaders of Jewish communities and others.

They launched the massive memorial project that is set to change the face of the park and will undoubtedly reinvigorate the memory of the Holocaust, which otherwise could fade fast as the last survivors of the period disappear and with them firsthand accounts.

The dignitaries' speeches were interspersed by symbolic musical performances, including the centerpiece that began the event, Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13, "Babi Yar."

Probably the 20th century's most important symphonist used the poems of fellow Soviet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in his work of 1962. Yevtushenko revived the memory of what happened at the site in his epic poem published a year earlier after Nikita Khrushchev slightly relaxed the megalomaniac iron grip of Stalin on internal freedom of speech in the Soviet Union.

The powerful work hits hard, and the words sung by bass and choir accompanied by a full orchestra invoke the dark times of the Second World War. Shostakovich himself was besieged in Leningrad and had firsthand experience of the horrors of the war.

World-renowned violinist Gideon Kremer and cellist Mischa Maisky were among the other performers.

In his speech at the ceremony Herzog said: "On the soil of Ukraine, for centuries there flourished one of the greatest and most important Jewish communities in the...