“One of the Holocaust’s worst single atrocities — the murder of 33,771 Jews over two days in September 1941, the start of the ‘Holocaust by Bullets,’” said a press release issued by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center at simultaneous commemorations in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Jerusalem in Israel Sept. 29.
The names of more than 1,000 newly identified victims of the massacre were read at the two ceremonies. They ranged from a 9-month-old baby to a 102-year-old woman, underscoring the indiscriminate and complete nature of the bloodbath. The 84th anniversary commemorations were at the Babyn Yar site in Kyiv and at the National Library of Israel.
Speakers at the event in Jerusalem included Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center; Yevgen Korniychuk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel; and Dani Dayan, chair of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
“Memory is a moral weapon against denial, oblivion and distortion,” Sharansky declared. Now resident in Israel, he was a Ukrainian-born fighter against Stalinist repression who was imprisoned for almost a decade in the former Soviet Union. “Precisely in times of war, the obligation to defend the truth is doubled,” he said.
Korniychuk thanked Sharansky for working together with the Ukrainian government to maintain the site and its dignified memorial of the massacre and its victims. “Let’s do everything we can in order to preserve the history and prevent such atrocities from happening again,” he said of the Nazi horrors at Babyn Yar.
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He pointed to Moscow’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel, the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust.
In 1941, just days after the German imperialist army occupied Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, SS and Gestapo forces and their collaborators rounded up and machine-gunned thousands to death over a ravine at Babyn Yar Sept. 29-30. Over the following two years, the ravine on the city’s outskirts became the largest mass grave in Europe. Some 100,000 people — Jews but also Roma and Ukrainian prisoners — were slaughtered there.
During the three and a half years of Moscow’s war on the Ukrainian people, more than 300,000 people have visited the Babyn Yar memorial.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took part in the commemoration in Kyiv.
The systematic gunning down of Kyiv’s Jews was one of dozens of similar mass murders of Jews, as Nazi forces aimed to implement their “Final Solution” as they marched across the country. Others included Oct. 12-13 in Dnepropetrovsk (11,000 killed), Oct. 23 in Odesa (34,000), Dec. 30 in Simferopol in Crimea (10,000), and in February-March 1942 in Kharkiv (14,000).