![]() They were all taken to Babi Yar, which means “grandmother’s ravine” or “old woman’s ravine” in Ukrainian. Most were moving in a self-absorbed way, in silence and with a doomed look. Here and there old and sick people who lacked the strength to move by themselves were being carried, probably by sons or daughters, on carts without any assistance. And the children – my God, there were so many children! All this was moving, burdened with luggage and children. ![]() Ukrainian engineer Fedir Phido recounted the sorrow of the Jews on their way to Babi Yar, as quoted by Dutch historian Karel Berkhoff in his book Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule: “Many thousands of people, mainly old ones – but middle-aged people were also not lacking – were moving towards Babi Yar. The German occupiers demanded that Kyiv’s Jews gather near a train station on the city’s outskirts for “resettlement” elsewhere those who refused to go there were threatened with death.Ī German Einsatzgruppen soldier talks to two unidentified women at the top of the Babi Yar ravine, where more than 33,000 people, mostly Jews, were massacred on September 29 and 30, 1941. But for those who remained, it was the beginning of a nightmare.Īs explosions planted by the Soviet secret police the NKVD rocked Kiev, the Nazis decided to eliminate the city’s Jews – driven by the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracist canard at the heart of Nazi ideology, which falsely alleged that the Jewish people were responsible for Bolshevism. Nearly 100,000 Jews fled the Ukrainian capital before the Nazis took it. ![]() This followed the Nazis’ capture of Kyiv on September 19, as they stormed through Soviet territory after launching Operation Barbarossa in June. I burst into tears.” Dina Pronicheva, one of the few survivors of the Babi Yar massacre, captured its horror when she gave testimony in the trial of fifteen German soldiers in Kyiv in 1946.Īt the Babi Yar ravine just outside Kyiv, 33,771 civilians were massacred on September 29 and 30, 1941, according to figures the Einzatsgruppen C (a Waffen SS travelling death squad) sent back to Berlin. Suddenly I heard a child screaming: ‘Mum!’ It sounded like my little daughter. I could hear some people breathing others were moaning in pain. I was on top of dead people – and injured people. I could feel my arms, my legs, my stomach, my head. I came to my senses – and suddenly I understood everything. The shooting went on people were still falling. At first I didn’t understand a thing: where was I? How did I end up there? I thought I was going inside. Before the shooting started, I was so scared that I fell into the pit. Starting in March 1944, the bodies that the occupying Nazis had secretly buried in the forest were "brought out, burned and pulverized in order to prevent this crime from ever being known, in order to prevent anyone taking responsibility for it," Karol Nawrocki, the head of the Institute of National Remembrance, said Wednesday.“A policeman told me to undress and pushed me to the edge of the pit, where a group of people were awaiting their fate. A symbolic grave in the Bialucki Forest near Ilowo is seen on July 13, 2022, the site where the mass grave of about 8,000 German Nazi victims from the nearby Soldau concentration camp in Dzialdowo was unearthed at the beginning of July 2022. Investigators from a national historical institute marked the finding this week with speeches and wreath-laying at the site in the Bialuty Forest, 100 miles north of Warsaw. Special investigators in Poland say they have found two mass graves containing the ashes of at least 8,000 Poles slain by the Nazis during World War II in forest executions that the Nazis later tried to hide by incinerating the bodies and planting trees on the burial pits.
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