Zelensky honors 34,000 Jews murdered in Nazi Babin Yar massacre

2023-09-29 13:39:07

In just two days, between September 29 and 30, 1941, 33,771 Jews were executed outside kyiv by the Einsatzgruppen. It was the greatest crime committed by the Third Reich so far and an unequivocal example of how far the Nazis were willing to go with regard to extermination.

Now, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, commemorates the eighty-second anniversary of this massacre in a ravine located in what is now a park in the city of Kiev.

“On September 29, 1941, the Nazis began mass shootings of Jews in Babin Yar, Kiev,” Zelensky wrote on his Telegram account, where he also published a video of the commemoration.

In the images, Zelensky can be seen leaving a candle at the monument that remembers the victims. Survivors and people who saved Jews from the massacre, one of the most massive in the Holocaust, participated in the event, which was led by a rabbi.

“In total, about 100,000 people, Jews, Gypsies, Ukrainians, were killed during the Nazi occupation in Babin Yar,” Zelensky added. “No matter how many years pass, humanity will always remember the lives that Nazism took, and will always remember that its perversity was punished,” wrote the Ukrainian president, who is Jewish and counts members of his family among those killed during the Holocaust. in Ukraine.

Why Babi Yar (“Grandmother’s ravine”) and not another place? This was a lonely place on the outskirts of the capital and was perfect for a mass execution, to make their bodies disappear in the depths of those wide, natural gorges, without having to dig mass graves.

At the beginning of 1942 this place also became a mass grave where Germans and Ukrainians shot thousands of Russian soldiers captured from the Red Army, members of the gypsy race and militants of the Soviet Communist Party.

A monument was not erected until 1976, although only to commemorate the soldiers of the Red Army or members of the Communist Party shot in the ravines, without making any mention of the Hebrews or the rest of those murdered.

And so it was until the fall of the USSR in 1991. After the independence of Ukraine, the more than 100,000 victims of Babi Yar were finally remembered regardless of their origin, whether Jewish, Russian or Ukrainian.