Babi Yar, a ravine near Kyiv, was the scene of possibly the largest shooting massacre during the Holocaust. After the war, commemoration efforts encountered serious difficulty because of the policy of the Soviet Union. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a number of memorials have been erected. The creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was initiated in 2016.
Soviet leadership did not place any emphasis on the Jewish aspect of the Babi Yar tragedy; instead, it presented these atrocities as 'murder of peaceful Soviet people' and included the Jews among the wider Soviet populace.[1] The first draft report of the Extraordinary State Commission (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия), dated December 25, 1943 was officially censored in February 1944 as follows:[2]
The Soviets accurately reported the total number of Babi Yar dead, but they did not break out ethnicity until decades later, Even then, they did not accurately represent the number of Roma who were murdered.[3]After the war, several attempts were made to erect a memorial at Babi Yar to commemorate the fate of the Jewish victims. A turning point was Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 1961 poem on Babi Yar, which begins "Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet" ("There are no monuments over Babi Yar");[4] it is also the subject of each of the five movements of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13.
An official memorial to Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was erected in 1976.[5]
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian government allowed the establishment of a separate memorial specifically identifying the Jewish victims. The creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was initiated in 2016.
The monuments to commemorate the numerous events associated with Babi Yar tragedy include:
On the night of 16 July 2006, the memorial dedicated to the Jewish victims was vandalized. Several gravestones, the foundation of the commemorative sledge-stone, and several steps leading to the Menorah memorial were damaged.[9] [10] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine issued a statement condemning the act of vandalism.[11]
On 1 March 2022, the complex which includes both the memorial and the cemetery for victims the Babi Yar massacre was hit by a missile attack carried out by the Russian Federation during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[12]
See also: Yad Vashem.
A small triangular section of land in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York City (a neighborhood with a large Jewish and Russian population), was named Babi Yar Triangle in 1981, and renovated in 1988.[13]
Alan G. Gass, FAIA, President of the Babi Yar Park Foundation that originally developed the Park with the City and County of Denver, stated:
There is a memorial to the victims of Babi Yar at the Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery in Giv'atayim. The memorial was erected over bone fragments from Babi Yar that were re-interred at the cemetery. The bones were brought out of Ukraine by three American college students in July 1971. The memorial was dedicated in 1972 by the Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir. There is an annual ceremony on Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Day.
A memorial to the victims of the Babi Yar Massacre was erected in the Sydney suburb of Bondi on 28 September 2014, which has a large Russian-speaking Jewish community. The monument was unveiled by the Mayor of Waverley and the Federal Member, Malcolm Turnbull. The erection of the monument was an initiative of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and its Public Affairs Director, Alexander Ryvchin, who was born in the city of Kyiv, where the massacre took place.[14] The English portion of the inscription on the monument reads:
See also: Babi Yar in poetry. The massacres at Babi Yar have been the subject of many artistic works. A number of films, documentaries, novels, poems, musical compositions, and television productions have commererated the tragedy of murder and loss.
In his 1961 book, Star in Eclipse: Russian Jewry Revisited, Joseph Schechtman provided an account of the Babi Yar tragedy.
A poem was written by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko; this in turn was set to music for full orchestra by world famous composer Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13 in 1962.
Anatoly Kuznetsov began writing a memoir of his wartime life when he was 14. Over the years he continued working on it, adding documents and eyewitness testimony. In 1966, Kuznetsov's was published in censored form in the Soviet monthly literary magazine Yunost. He managed to smuggle 35 mm photographic film containing the uncensored manuscript with him when he defected from the USSR, and the book was published in the West in 1970.
D. M. Thomas's 1981 novel, The White Hotel uses the massacre's anonymity and violence as a counterpoint to the intimate and complex nature of the human psyche.
In 1985, a documentary film Babiy Yar: Lessons of History by Vitaly Korotich was made to mark the tragedy.
An oratorio was composed by the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych to the text of Dmytro Pavlychko (2006).
In 2021, Belarusian and Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa released the documentary, Babi Yar. Context. The film explores the prelude and aftermath of the massacre using footage shot by German and Soviet troops, and was reviewed favorably by The New York Times.[15]
