Ukraine held ceremonies to mark the 76th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacres, when on Sept. 29-30, 1941 Nazi occupying forces in Kyiv, with the help of local collaborators, rounded up and killed 33,771 of the city’s Jews at a ravine in the north-west of the Ukrainian capital.
The ceremony was attended by the Chief Rabbi of Kyiv and all of Ukraine Yaakov Dov Bleich, as well as Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman.
The Babyn Yar massacre was the worst Nazi atrocity of the Holocaust up to that point in the war. Between 100,000 and 150,000 people were killed at the ravine during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, which lasted from September 1941 to November 1943. They included Jews, Roma, and Ukrainian nationalists.
The people were murdered by a shot to the neck from a submachine gun. The Nazis then undermined the wall of the ravine so that it collapsed and covered the bodies. Later, in an attempt to conceal the atrocity as German forces were retreating from the Soviet Union, the Nazis forced Soviet prisoners of war to disinter the bodies and burn them. The ashes of the victims were scattered on surrounding farmland.
While the Nazis kept meticulous records of the numbers of people they murdered at Babyn Yar and other Holocaust sites, only 10 percent of the Jews massacred at the ravine in Kyiv have so far been identified by name.
