seven hundred and seventy-one Jews
were murdered at Babyn Yar in thirty-
six hours. This was among the first
acts of mass murder of Jews during
the Second World War, and it remained
the biggest single mass execution of
the Holocaust. After the massacre, the
Germans continued to use the ravine
as an execution site for Jews, Roma,
the mentally ill, and others. In 1942,
Germany established a P.O.W. camp
next to Babyn Yar. When Soviet troops
were poised to retake the city, in 1943,
German soldiers ordered the inmates
to remove bodies from the ravine and
burn them.
After reclaiming Kyiv, Soviet au-
thorities gave a group of foreign jour-
nalists a tour of Babyn Yar. The foot-
age of that tour, along with pictures
taken earlier by a Nazi photographer
and a number of photos taken by a spe-
cial Soviet state commission which were
kept secret for seventy years, made up
the visual record from the time. In 1946,
while the Nuremberg trials were under
way, a court in Kyiv tried fifteen Ger-
man officers who had committed atroc-
ities in Ukraine. Several witnesses and
survivors testified. The court sentenced
twelve of the defendants to death; they
were hanged in the city’s central square,
now known as Maidan Nezalezhnosti,
or Independence Square. But follow-
ing those executions the Soviet Union
banned any public discussion of what
had happened to Kyiv’s Jews.
Babyn Yar was more than forty
yards deep and stretched the length
of several city blocks. Soviet author-
ities decided to fill it in by directing
wastewater mixed with clay from
nearby brickmaking plants to the ra-
vine. In the early nineteen-fifties, a
dam was constructed to contain the
flow, turning the ravine into a murky
lake. On March 13, 1961, the dam burst.
The ensuing mudslide killed hundreds
of people; their remains mixed with
the bones of those who had been shot
by the Germans.
For forty-five years after the end
of the Second World War, the Soviet
Union censored all documentation of
the Holocaust, including any attempt
to memorialize Babyn Yar. Even after
the collapse of the U.S.S.R., twenty-five
more years passed before a comprehen-sive memorial effort began. Then came
a new war in Europe––Vladimir Pu-
tin’s invasion of Ukraine.G
erman forces carried out thousands
of mass shootings of Jews in
Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia, western Russia, and the east-
ern territories of Poland, in what has
become known as the Holocaust by
bullets. German soldiers and police, as
well as contingents of local collabora-
tors, murdered more than two million
Jews. For decades following the war,
none of the killing sites were marked
as places of Jewish extermination. A
group of Soviet Jewish writers––includ-
ing Vasily Grossman, Margarita Aliger,
and Ilya Ehrenburg––assembled a com-
pendium of testimony and documents,
but censors banned its publication. Ac-
cording to Soviet historiography, the
Nazis had targeted all Soviet citizens
equally. “If you emphasized Jewish losses,
you were a bourgeois nationalist,” Yo-
hanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a professor of
Jewish studies and history at North-
western University, who grew up in
Kyiv, told me.
In 1961, during a brief period of ten-
tative liberalization known as the Thaw,
Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem
that began, “No monument stands over
Babi Yar.” (Babi Yar is the Russian-lan-
guage name of the ravine.) Yevtushenko
became famous in the West for his cour-
age in writing about a taboo subject.
People outside Kyiv learned the name
Babi Yar. But the obliteration of the
site continued. Following the dam di-
saster, construction crews filled in the
ravine. A new road was built alongside
it and a residential neighborhood went
up. In 1966, the Times published a dis-
patch with the headline “Boys of Kiev
Play Ball on Babi Yar,” describing
young working families who were now
able to move “out to the fresh air of the
suburbs from their old crowded and
dingy apartments.” Not long afterward,
the city built a television tower near the
grounds and a TV-production center
on the site of the old Jewish cemetery.
Yevtushenko was not the only Soviet
writer to take on the subject of Babyn
Yar. Around 1944, a teen-ager in Kyiv
named Anatoly Kuznetsov, who lived
near the site, began recording his mem-
“While you were deciding, we raised our prices.” ories. He ultimately assembled notes,