These survivors, including Bubnov and Pronicheva, were able to escape the immediate massacre at Babi Yar. They hid, sometimes in plain sight, with the help of sympathetic non-Jews. Their accounts provide crucial testimony to the atrocities committed at Babi Yar.
4. The Nazis tried to cover up the massacre.
After the massacre at Babi Yar, the Nazis attempted to cover up their crime. They forced Ukrainian prisoners of war to dig up the bodies of the murdered Jews and burn them. The Nazis also tried to destroy all evidence of the massacre by exhuming the bodies and burning them in an attempt to erase any trace of their horrific deeds.
Despite these efforts, the truth about Babi Yar eventually came to light. Survivors told their stories, and evidence of the massacre was uncovered. The massacre at Babi Yar serves as a stark reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust and the depths of human cruelty.
5. Remembering Babi Yar.
Today, the site of the Babi Yar massacre is a memorial to the victims. The massacre at Babi Yar is remembered as one of the most horrific events of the Holocaust, a symbol of the Nazi’s brutality and the tragic loss of life that occurred during World War II.
It is important to remember and honor the victims of Babi Yar and all those who perished in the Holocaust. By bearing witness to the atrocities of the past, we can ensure that such horrors are never repeated.
Although I was not standing close to the pit, terrible cries of panic-stricken people and quiet children’s voices calling ‘Mother, mother….” reached me.
4. Ultimately 100,000 Jews and others were murdered at Babi Yar.
For two more long years, the Nazis killed people at Babi Yar, throwing their bodies into the ravine. Jews were taken to Babi Yar from elsewhere to be shot. Other groups of people were murdered at Babi Yar as well, including patients from a nearby psychiatric hospital, Soviet POWs, Ukrainian civilians, and Roma. Historians estimate that 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar, about 60,000 of them Jews. The last prisoners to be killed at the site were shot just weeks before Soviet troops took over the area on November 6, 1943.
Historians estimate that 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar, about 60,000 of them Jews.
5. The crimes of Babi Yar were covered up and forgotten.
As the Soviet army advanced on Kiev in 1943, the Nazis tried to hide evidence of what took place at Babi Yar. Prisoners from a local concentration camp were forced to bring Jewish tombstones from a nearby cemetery to the ravine, where they were used to build enormous pyres. The prisoners were forced to exhume the bodies of thousands and pile them on the pyres.
Memorial at Babi Yar
Nazi officials doused the pyres with gasoline and lit them on fire. The huge flames burning the evidence of the massacres were visible across Kiev. When the bodies were burned, the prisoners who’d done this ghoulish work were themselves shot, and their bodies and all evidence of what had taken place were burned and reduced to ashes. Just 15 of these prisoners managed to survive and tell the world what they’d done and witnessed.
In the years after the Holocaust, Babi Yar was largely neglected, and the crimes that had occurred there were forgotten. In 1948, a Soviet Jew named Boris Braynin wrote about visiting the site:
That place, where about 100,000 people were brutally murdered, is in a disgraceful state. The cows are grazing there, while the bones as you can see are thrown around. The beautiful crypt above Babi Yar is turned into the toilet….
In 1961, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a famous poem called Babi Yar, which begins with the haunting words “No monument stands over Babi Yar. A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone. I am afraid….”
The Soviet Union did erect a memorial at Babi Yar in 1976 but did not specify that Jews were the primary victims, referring only to generic “civilian victims”. Much of the ravine was filled in with earth. After Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, a memorial in the shape of a Jewish menorah was erected at the site to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre there.
Visiting Kiev in 2016, journalist Linda Kinstler described a site almost entirely devoid of historical awareness: “Today, Babi Yar is a popular local hangout, complete with a makeshift soccer field and playground. When I visited the field on a sunny afternoon this summer, two young Ukrainians sat on the edge of the ravine smoking cigarettes, their legs dangling over a picnicking couple sprawled out in the valley below…” Few people she encountered understood the magnitude of what took place there.
A Babi Yar memorial complex, which will include a museum, research center, and memorial, is being created by the Ukrainian government, which plans to open the center in 2025 or 2026. In 2021, part of the project opened: a structure that looks like part of a traditional European synagogue now marks the site, offering visitors an opportunity to recognize the Jewish men, women, and young children who were horribly murdered there, and perhaps inspire some visitors to pray.