“No gravestone stands on Babyn Yar,” wrote the Soviet poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko in 1961. He was condemning the Soviet regime’s failure to acknowledge the Babyn Yar tragedy twenty-five years after World War II had ended. When a monument was finally erected in 1974 to commemorate the deaths of 100,000 people generically characterized as “Soviet citizens,” no mention was made of the 33,771 Jews who perished there on September 29 and 30, 1941. When the surrounding park was established in 1980, Babyn Yar quickly grew into a popular recreational area rather than a place to remember those who had been killed.
Not until the fall of the Soviet Union and the birth of an independent Ukraine was the Jewish identity of the victims acknowledged and a Menorah monument built on the site. The opening of several independent Judaica centers, as well as twelve private Jewish history museums all over Ukraine, helped return the lost page of the Holocaust to Ukraine’s historical narrative. As has been argued by former US ambassadors, Ukraine has done “an admirable job of containing the intolerant demons of its not-so-distant past,” re-opening dialogue between ethnic Ukrainians and Jews and dispelling speculations of Russian propaganda about Ukraine’s anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, and neo-fascist nature.
