The Russian bombing of Kiev’s TV tower, which took place last Tuesday (1), ended up damaging an important monument, a symbol of Ukrainian suffering under totalitarian regimes. Located next to the tower, the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was hit by the Russian Armed Forces. According to the Ukrainian government, at least five people were killed in the attack. The severity of the damage to the monument has not yet been revealed.
The country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, spoke about the matter on his Twitter account: “To the world: what’s the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years if the world is quiet when a bomb falls in the same place as Babi Yar? At least five dead. History repeats itself,” he wrote. Understand, below, what was Babi Yar – the massacre of Ukrainian Jews by Nazi Germany that tried to be covered up by the communists.
“Hitler’s troops occupied Kiev on September 19, 1941 and from day one they started robbing and killing Jews. We lived in terror. When I saw the posters on the streets of the city and read the order for all Jews in Kiev to gather at Babi Yar, deep in my heart I sensed the problems. I understood that nothing good awaited us there. So I dressed my little ones, a 3 year old girl and a 5 year old boy, put their belongings in a small bag and took it to my mother-in-law’s house. Then I picked up my sick mother and, following the order, we set off for Babi Yar.”
Confirming the fears of actress Dina Pronisheva, a Jew born in Ukraine and married to a Russian soldier drafted into the war, nothing good awaited the Jews of Kiev in the ravine that led to the first mass extermination promoted by Nazi Germany. A month before that September 29, 1941, about 23,000 Jews had already been shot in Kamenets-Podolski, a Ukrainian town near the Hungarian border. What happened at Babi Yar, however, inaugurated the systematic killing that would become the Holocaust: an estimated 33,700 Jews were massacred in 48 hours, according to data from the Nazi squad itself. “It was the first time in history that a premeditated killing had virtually wiped out the entire Jewish population of a major European city,” said historian Karel Berkhoff.
Reports like Dina Pronishva’s are rare. From the Nazi occupation of Ukraine to the resumption of power by the Soviets in 1944, nearly 1.5 million Jews were murdered in the country. Nearly 80% were shot dead, a “modality” of extermination that would lead to the creation of the term “Shoah by bullets”. These genocides, carried out by extermination groups called Einzatsgruppen, were, for a long time, overshadowed by the profusion of reports of the “Gas Shoah” practiced in the well-known Nazi chambers. French priest Patrick Desbois was one of the first to delve into the untold story of Jews killed in the Soviet Union, victims whose graves were hidden by the Nazis and later ignored by the Soviets.
Accounts such as that of Dina Pronisheva give a dimension to the horror. “A policeman told me to undress and pushed me to the edge of the grave, where a group of people awaited their fate. Before the shooting started, I was so scared that I fell down the well. I fell on corpses. (…) The shooting continued; people were still falling. I came to my senses – and suddenly I understood everything. I was pretending to be dead, on top of dead and injured people. Suddenly, I heard a child screaming, ‘Mom!’ It looked like my little girl. I started to cry,” the actress reported during the trial of fifteen German soldiers in 1946.
the second erasure
The end of the Second World War was not enough for the Jews killed at Babi Yar to be recognized and honored as victims of the anti-Semitic genocide. It took a few decades for the people massacred there to receive their due honor, thanks to the Soviet obsession with perpetuating the idea that all peoples under the Kremlin suffered “equally” the Nazi horrors.
First, there was the erasure: the Babi Yar ravine was literally backfilled and filled with industrial waste. In 1961, it was the scene of a landslide that killed hundreds of people and dumped mud, water and human remains from a dam onto the streets of Kiev. Years later, it turned into an apartment complex.
Then came the distortion. In the 1960s, the place began to be treated as the memorial of a story told through the Soviet lens. This is how the Ukrainian writer Viktor Kekrasov narrates:
“Everything happened like that – people came, cried and spread flowers around them. [de Babi Yar]. There were no crowns, nor where to put them. There was no monument or obelisk – there were just bushes and tall grasses. But from September 1966 everything changed. A stone appeared – of polished gray granite with an inscription that was edited and approved by all relevant authorities, saying that on this site of mass murder a monument would be erected for ‘Soviet civilians’. [que foram assassinados] during the period of temporary German fascist occupation from 1941 to 1943’”.
“Now every year on September 29, beside the stone a podium is set up and from there the secretary of the Shevchenko County Party Committee gives a speech which is mainly devoted to the achievements of the district entrusted to him in the domain construction and fulfillment of the plan [oficial] across multiple domains. Then there are speeches by several leaders in production, among them being necessary ‘one of Jewish nationality’ (you couldn’t simply say ‘a Jew’), who would talk about ‘the bestial atrocities’ of the Zionists in Israel”, says the writer, when narrating the Soviet feat of turning a monument of homage to the Jews into an anti-Semitic event.
It was not until 1991, when Ukraine gained its independence, that the Babi Yar began to feature in school textbooks and in the public debate about the memory of the Holocaust. There is currently a large museum under construction in Kiev, the project of which is led by Father Desbois. For the religious, the site must provide visitors with an experience similar to the Auschwitz camp, with lists of victims and their murderers. “We need to restore the feeling that this is the scene of a horrible crime.
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