Following the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, approximately 100,000 Jews fled Kyiv or were already serving in the Soviet military. In late September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries perpetrated one of the largest massacres of World War II.

But on 13 March 1961 the dam collapsed and a wall of liquid mud swallowed up crowds of people, homes, cars and trams. Other groups of people who were killed at Babyn Yar included: patients from a local psychiatric hospital, Roma (Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war, and civilians. To his grandfather, as to many others, their arrival was a deliverance: It marked the end of Soviet rule, which had brought about collectivization, purges and the forced famine of the Holodomor. The missile was off-target and the tower was not significantly damaged, but several passers-by were killed in the adjacent park – a medical colleague who lives in the area sent me some grim pictures of the dismembered victims. Despite many efforts, there was no memorial at the site until the Soviets installed a monument in 1976.It served to intern Soviet POWs, partisans, and Jews who had survived the mass actions of late September 1941.

At the age fourteen, Kuznetsov began recording in a notebook everything he saw and heard about the Babi Yar massacre. Knowing that the original manuscript’s discovery could get him arrested, he photographed its pages and then buried it in the ground. What pressures and motivations may have affected soldiers to volunteer for the Einsatzgruppen and later murder innocent civilians? It would use virtual reality to put visitors in the shoes of victims and perpetrators - though Khrzhanovsky insisted that it was still a work in progress. I’m making an absolutely desperate effort to turn myself into another person,” he explained to the CBS interviewer Morley Safer, gazing down morosely through Coke-bottle glasses, as if the effort was already doomed.This was the first major massacre in the Holocaust by bullets, although smaller massacres had preceded it,” Czerny added. Young and scrappy, at the outset of the novel, Anatoly is twelve years old, while at the end, he is fourteen years old—a crucial age, as the occupying German army deported boys fourteen and above to Germany. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Contrary to the " myth of the clean Wehrmacht", the Sixth Army under the command of Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau worked together with the SS and SD to plan and execute the mass-murder of the Jews of Kyiv. Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C and Police Battalion 45, commanded by Major Besser, conducted the massacre, supported by members of a Waffen-SS battalion. In 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine proposed the removal of Babi Yar as well as many other Russian, Soviet, and Belarusian works from the school curriculum for grades six through eleven. The dam collapsed after it was hit by a heavy rainstorm, resulting in a mudslide that swept away the low-lying Kurenivka neighborhood and several other areas.

Babij Jar è un fossato nei pressi della città ucraina di Kiev, noto per essere stato durante la Seconda guerra mondiale un sito di massacri ad opera dei nazisti e collaborazionisti ucraini ai danni della popolazione locale. A monument was finally created at Babi Yar in 1976 – but it made no reference to the Holocaust, instead blandly paying homage to the “citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of war” murdered there between 1941 and 1943. It is little discussed in Russia and Ukraine, perhaps because it delivers unwelcome truths about both countries. It all happened with real, live people, and there is not the slightest element of literary fantasy in this book.