Ukraine Memorial Service for the Holocaust: Survivors and Liberators Remember Babi Yar
Survivors recall that Jews in Ukraine were told 65 years ago to gather warms clothes and belongings as if they were going on a journey in the custody of their Nazi captors. They were instead ordered to strip naked and then were machine-gunned in their thousands by Nazi guards and their bodies left in a pit prepared for them. Witnesses recall that Nazi soldiers laughed and taunted their victims before murdering them. Some observers claim that the world’s silence in the wake of Babi Yar served to embolden the Nazi’s “Final Solution” and carry out further massacres, atrocities, and mechanized death-camps.
At the memorial service, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, and Israeli President Moshe Katsav, solemnly processed behind an honour guard of Ukrainian soldiers bearing flowers to mark the place where the victims fell. Both of the dignitaries spoke to the assembly, while witnesses, liberators, and survivors – as well as some now recognized as Righteous Gentiles by the Israeli Government – were also on hand. Representatives from other countries were also present. The memorial was the brainchild of Russian Jewish businessman and founder of the World Holocaust Forum Vyacheslav Moshe Kantor. “Most people today simply don’t know what happened here”, said Kantor who added that the idea for the memorial came to him some years ago when he noticed children playing soccer at the site of the massacre. Some observers express misgivings that the site is now used as a park for picnickers and children’s sports. The September 27th memorial was held at a Soviet era monument, while a more private memorial service was held by Jews at another nearby monument in the form of a menorah.
Sixty-five years ago, Nazis murdered some 33,771 persons at the Babi Yar site, while during the balance of the Second World War, a total of perhaps 100,000 including many non-Jews were annihilated there. Before invading Russian liberators reached the Ukraine in 1943, Nazi captors ordered survivors to unearth and burn the remains of all those buried at the site. The total count of the murdered remains a mystery. The Soviets did not mark the site afterwards and were long apprehensive about marking the sites of murdered Jews, just as their were loathe to mark the burial site of Polish army officers the Soviet Union murdered at the Katyn Forest in Poland during the Second World War. It was not until 1961, after Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem “Babi Yar”, that the Soviet regime decides to erect a monument at the massacre site. Officials in Israel calculate that only 20 percent of the former Soviet Union’s victims during the Holocaust have been accounted for, while in Western Europe the figure stands at 90 percent. Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who died in the mid-1950s, was himself an anti-Semite.
In August 2006, a secret mission to find Jewish graves in Eastern Europe discovered a site near Lvov Ukraine where the remains of 1,800 Jews were found in a mass grave. The search for the graves was initiated by the Roman Catholic liaison to the Jewish community in France. It is now believed that there are some 500 mass murder sites in Ukraine yet to be discovered. Pope John Paul II visited the site in 2001.
Lvov had a Jewish population exceeding 110,000 before the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war, the Jewish community there was bolstered by some 100,000 Jewish refugees. Ukrainian nationalists, in cooperation with the German National Socialists, began the series of mass murders in July 1941. In 1943, the Jewish ghetto in Lvov was leveled by the Nazis and its remaining Jewish population of 65,000 deported and murdered.
