The Babyn Yar Massacre: 80 years later, there is a monument, memorial

• Author: REVITAL YAKIN KRAKOVSKY
• Published date: 29 September 2021

Poland is strewn with cemeteries and concentration camps built by the Germans, aiming annihilate the Jewish people in a methodical and, unfortunately, efficient manner of mass annihilation by gas. Auschwitz actually became the symbol of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe and the cynical and cruel gate reading "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work sets you free) is the image etched into the collective conscious.

A little over a year ago, I received a call from Sana Britavsky, CEO of the Genesis Prize Foundation, and she said: "As a daughter of the Jewish people, Auschwitz is my symbol too. But being born in Ukraine, it is not my Holocaust story, nor that of a million other former-USSR Jews living in Israel. Nor is it the story of the 2.5 million Jews murdered in Eastern Europe. Our symbol is Babyn Yar."

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Within 48 hours, essentially all of Kiev's Jewry was obliterated in the Babyn Yar Massacre, known as the biggest mass massacre of the Holocaust, committed in the shortest period of time. Some 33,771 Jews, mainly women, children and the elderly, assembled near the Jewish cemetery by order of the Nazis just one day after they conquered the city. From there, they were taken to the Babyn Yar forest, stripped, lined up over the valley of death, murdered by gunfire and thrown in, covering the bodies of Jews murdered just seconds before them. Throughout the Nazi conquest, Babyn Yar continued to be a site of mass murder, a burial site for about 100,000 victims, mostly Jews – rendering Babyn Yar among the largest mass graves in Europe.

The story of the mass murders by gunfire and the mass graves was not a new one. It was mentioned in the history books, but public attention was never really focused on it, but rather on the German concentration camps in Poland, and the stories of the Eastern European Jews sent to their death in Poland were told extensively. The site at which 2.5 million Jews, 1.5 million in Ukraine alone, were murdered by gunfire, near their homes, and buried in thousands of mass graves throughout Eastern Europe – in Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Belarus and Ukraine – never received worthy commemoration under the USSR regime or thereafter, and not without reason.

The Nazis began conquering the USSR and their eradication of the Jewish communities in 1941, going on for two years. When the Soviets liberated the area, and mainly after...