The Jewish Memorial in Ukraine Reportedly Bombed by Russia
At Babi Yar no memorials preside."Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote that line in a 1961 poem in a reference to to the ravine in the suburbs of Kyiv where, starting on Sept.
29, 1941, and continuing into the following day, over 33,000 Jews were murdered by Nazi forces and their Ukrainian collaborators.On March 1, 2022, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Russian strike against a TV tower in Kyiv killed five people and damaged the nearby site.“What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?” Zelenskyy asked in an anguished tweet, using the Ukrainian variant of the name.But silence and Babi Yar have a long history together. “All the silence screams,” as Yevtushenko put it in his poem.As a historian of the Holocaust in Ukraine and the author of the recently published “In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust,” I have sought to fill in some of these silences by speaking and writing about the atrocities that took place.On Friday, Sept.
26, 1941, when the Germans occupied Kyiv, announcements printed in Russian, Ukrainian and German began to appear on lampposts and walls around the city ordering all Jews to assemble Monday at 8 a.m.
near the site of a Jewish cemetery. That morning, the day before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur was to begin, over 33,000 people gathered, mostly women, children and the elderly, as the Soviet government had already mobilized the men capable of fighting into the Red Army.The multitude was marched under guard through a barbed wire enclosure leading into Babi Yar.
