Babyn Yar massacre: Over 33,000 killed in two-day Nazi operation

On 29 September, Ukraine commemorates the victims of the Babyn Yar tragedy, one of the most horrific symbols of the Holocaust. Nazi forces executed over 33,000 Jews in Kyiv’s Babyn Yar ravine for two days on 29-30 September 1941.

In total, about 100,000 people were killed in Babyn Yar during the Nazi occupation. The entire Jewish community of Kyiv was destroyed, including those who tried to save them. Representatives of other nationalities also became victims.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy considers the Babyn Yar tragedy “a terrible symbol of the fact that the most horrific crimes occur when the world chooses to ignore, remain silent, be indifferent, and not be determined enough to fight back against evil.”

On the “road of death,” they drove entire families – men, children, women, and pregnant women – to the ravine. “The scale of this evil is still difficult to comprehend,” Zelenskyy said.

Important details of the tragedy

On 27-28 September 1941, notices throughout Kyiv ordered all Jews to gather at the intersection of Melnykova and Dehtyarivska streets by 8 am on 29 September, bringing documents, money, valuables, and warm clothing. The notice warned that “Any Jew who does not follow this order and is found elsewhere will be shot.”

The first mass execution in Babyn Yar occurred on 27 September 1941, when 752 patients from a nearby psychiatric hospital were killed.

Mass shootings continued for five days, from 29 September to 3 October 1941.

According to German documents, 33,000 Jews were killed in the first two days of mass executions. Victims were directed through a narrow “corridor” about 3 meters wide, formed by Germans standing close together on both sides with sticks, clubs, and dogs.

Among the victims were infants, including a two-week-old baby, and the oldest victim was 103 years old.

Dina Pronicheva, a puppet theater actress, was one of the few adults who survived the Babyn Yar shootings. She testified at the 1946 Kyiv trial: “I closed my eyes, clenched my fists, tensed all my muscles and threw myself down. Before the shot. It seemed to me that I was flying for an eternity. I fell on the corpses successfully – not shot.”

Historian Mikhail Kalnitsky reports that over 100,000 people were killed in Babyn Yar during the two years of occupation. Half of them were Jews, while others included prisoners of war, repressed individuals, and partisans of various nationalities.

The first monument to the tragedy was installed in 1976, dedicated to “Soviet citizens, prisoners of war, and officers shot in Babyn Yar.” A monument specifically commemorating the Jewish victims, the Menorah, was unveiled in 1991, 50 years after the Babyn Yar massacres.

On 1 March 2022, a Russian missile hit a television tower in Kyiv and hit the territory of Babyn Yar. Five civilian Kyiv residents walking along the sidewalk past the tower were killed, and five others were injured.

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