Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah. Every year I try to post something relevant to this very sad day, and this year I am sharing photos that I took just two days ago on my first visit to the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial site in Kiev, Ukraine. As always, there are no words to express the horrors of the injustices inflicted upon the Jews in Europe. Standing at the very site of the greatest mass killing of its time, on a hilltop within the city of Kiev, one can barely imagine how roughly 33,000 Jews were brutally murdered over the course of just two days. And yet, it did happen and there were even a few who survived and where able to climb out of the mass grave to tell their tales.
On this day it is our job to make sure that the horrors of the Holocaust are never forgotten, and to share the tales with our children in the hopes that the world will wake up and erradicate evil.
The memorial site just in front of the Babi Yar ravine which served as the mass grave.
The ravine today.
An old photo from 1941, stating that 33,771 Jews were killed on Sept 29th and 30th, 1941. More Jews were killed subsequently, totalling at least 50,000.
And while I am mentioning the crimes against Jews, as this is Holocaust Remembrance Day, many others were murdered at this site as well. In the two years that followed, Ukrainians, Russians, Gypsies and people of all nationalities were murdered in Babi Yar. Nobody will ever determine how many and what nationalities are buried there, because 90% of the corpses were burned, their ashes scattered in ravines and fields to cover up the crime. Attempts have been made by the Yad v'Shem Jewish Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem to compile a list of names of those Jews murdered at Babi Yar and only several thousand have been identified sadly enough.
To read more about the actual event, consult Wikipedia.
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