On 29 and 30 September 1941, in a ravine on the north-western edge of Kyiv, the SS and their Ukrainian auxiliaries shot and killed 33,771 Jews. The figure comes from the Einsatzgruppe C report filed in Berlin a few days later, and from the German bureaucratic insistence that everything be counted. Babi Yar was the largest single mass killing of the Holocaust before the death camps. It was carried out, in two days, in the open air, two miles from the centre of a major European city.
Why Kyiv, why then
The German army took Kyiv on 19 September 1941. Within a week, several large explosions in the city centre destroyed buildings the Germans were using as command posts. The explosions had been set by Soviet engineers under NKVD orders before the city fell. Around 200 German soldiers and officers were killed. The German response was to blame the Jewish population of the city collectively and to use the explosions as the pretext for a mass killing that had been planned, in outline, before the city was even taken.
On 28 September, posters appeared across Kyiv ordering all Jews to assemble at the corner of Melnikova and Dokterivska streets at eight o’clock the next morning, with documents, money, valuables, and warm clothing. They were told they would be resettled. Anyone who failed to appear, the posters warned, would be shot.
The two days
Around 33,000 people came on the morning of 29 September. They were a cross-section of the remaining Jewish population of the city, which had not been able to evacuate before the German army arrived: the elderly, mothers with children, the disabled, the poor. They walked or were trucked along the route to the ravine at Babi Yar. As they got closer, they passed German checkpoints where they were made to leave their luggage, then their outer clothes, then their inner clothes, then their shoes. By the edge of the ravine they were naked.
They were marched in groups of ten down into the ravine and forced to lie face-down on top of those already shot. They were then shot through the back of the neck. The next group was made to lie on top of them. The killing was done by Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, with the assistance of Ukrainian auxiliary police. The shooting went on through the day and the next. By the evening of 30 September, 33,771 people had been murdered.
Survivors
Twenty-nine people are known to have survived. The most-quoted account is by Dina Pronicheva, a thirty-year-old Jewish actress at the Kyiv Puppet Theatre. Pronicheva had not at first been recognised as Jewish at the assembly point and had been told she could go home. Watching what was happening, she realised that going back to find her parents had drawn the soldiers’ attention to her. She was marched to the ravine with the others. At the moment of being shot, she threw herself off the edge a fraction before the bullet was fired and lay still under the bodies of others. After the soldiers had left she crawled out of the ravine in the dark. She survived the rest of the war in hiding and gave testimony at war crimes trials after the liberation. Most of what we know about how the killing actually happened on the ground at Babi Yar comes from her.
The site afterwards
The killing did not stop at Babi Yar in September 1941. The site continued to be used as a killing ground for the rest of the German occupation. Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists who had outlived their usefulness, and additional Jews captured later were murdered there. The total death toll at Babi Yar is approximately 100,000 across the period from September 1941 to September 1943.
In 1943, with the Soviet Army advancing, the regime brought in a Sonderkommando 1005 unit, like the one at Ponary, to exhume the bodies and burn them on pyres. The unit broke out in September 1943. Fifteen men escaped. The work of erasure was incomplete; the ravine still held human remains when the Soviet Army arrived in November.
The Soviet silence and the poem
The Soviet authorities did not, after the war, allow Babi Yar to be commemorated as a Jewish killing. Soviet ideology held that the victims of fascism should be commemorated as Soviet citizens, not as members of any specific national or religious group. The site was at one stage proposed as a sports stadium. In 1961 the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published the poem Babi Yar, opening with the lines that there was no monument over Babi Yar, and that the steep slope was like a rough gravestone. The poem became internationally famous and was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony. The Soviet government tried to suppress both. Neither could be suppressed. The poem was the moment Babi Yar entered international consciousness as a specifically Jewish killing site.
A formal Holocaust memorial centre was finally built at Babi Yar after Ukrainian independence in 1991, expanded in the 2010s, and damaged by Russian missile strikes in March 2022. The killing site is now also a Russian war crimes site, eighty years after the original killing.
See also
Sources
- Anatoly Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970
- Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule, Belknap Press, 2004
- Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
- USHMM: Babi Yar