jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and mass grave sites in ukraine

Commission, which raised half of the funds for it. It was dedicated in a well-attended ceremony
in October 2002.
Mass burial sites can be found throughout Ukraine, though the greatest numbers are in the west
in the areas that bore the brunt of the Nazi occupation. Burial sites are sometimes in urban areas,
but are most often on the periphery of settled areas – in fields or woods.
Jews were often marched out of villages and towns and executed. Sometimes they were forced
to dig their own graves. In scores of places, pre-existing natural features were used for collection
and burial of the bodies or the deposit of ashes if bodies were burned. This is the case at the
massacre site at Babyn Yar.
On September 26, 1941, a week after occupying Kyiv, the Germans -- ostensibly in retaliation
for sabotage -- decided to kill the Jews of the city. The killing was entrusted to the Nazi
Sonderkommando 4a, reinforced by Ukrainian auxiliary police.
On September 28, the city’s Jews were ordered to appear the next morning. When they did, they
were taken to the Babyn Yar ravine. As they approached the site, they were forced to hand over
any valuables in their possession, take off all their clothes, and advance towards the ravine edge,
in groups of ten. When they reached it, they were gunned down with automatic weapons. Later,
a thin layer of soil was thrown on their bodies. It is believed that over 33,700 Jews were
murdered in two days of shooting. In the months that followed, thousands more were taken to
Babyn Yar and shot. Neighbors turned in many Jews who tried to hide.
Babyn Yar served as a slaughterhouse for non-Jews as well, including Roma (“Gypsies”) and
Soviet prisoners of war as well as many non-Jewish Ukrainians.
It took a long time for a memorial to be erected at Babyn Yar (figure 38). Among those who
insisted that one be built were the writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, and the poet, Yevgeni Yevtushenko,
who, in 1961, published the extremely moving, and, ultimately, influential poem, “Babij Yar.”
The next year, Dmitri Shostakovich set the poem to music, incorporating it into his Thirteenth
Symphony.
The poem and symphony had a tremendous impact in the Soviet Union, and, in 1974, a
monument was finally erected. Unfortunately, the monument was built several hundred yards
away from the site of the massacre and there was no mention of the Jewish victims. Finally, in
the early 1990s, two monuments for Jewish victims were erected. 51
Adjacent to the site of the Babyn Yar massacres, is a small Jewish cemetery. Various accounts
of the killing and the subsequent burning of bodies of Babyn Yar mention the removal of stones
and iron fencing from this cemetery. In 1991, Albert Barr, an American visiting Kyiv, came
upon this abandoned and neglected cemetery while visiting the Babyn Yar site 52 (figures 36, 37).
51 See Shmuel Spector in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Israel Gutman, editor in chief, (New York: MacMillan
Publishing Company, 1990), Vol. I, 135.
52 Lynn Feinerman, “Area Man Finds Neglected Jewish Cemetery at Babi Yar,” Jewish Bulletin (October 1, 1993).
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