TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter VII: The Role of the Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories 221
The bones did not completely burn; they were ground up and tossed into
the trenches, from which the bodies had been taken. The witness reports:
“On September 25 and 26, [637] when the work was nearly finished, the
construction of another oven was ordered, upon which we ourselves were
supposed to be cremated. We deduced this from the fact that there were no
more corpses in Babi Yar, but we had built an oven nevertheless.”
In order to escape their own murder, Davidov and a number of his comrades
(35 to 40) escaped during the night of September 29, in which attempt at
least ten of them were killed. 638
The Black Book of Ilya Ehrenburg and Vassili Grossman summarizes this
witness testimony, but alters a few numbers. 639 The statements made in the
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust quite obviously have their origin in this source.
This Vladimir K. Davidov is apparently the only witness who claims to
have participated in the cremation of bodies of Babi Yar. His tale is wholly
unbelievable. The number of bodies – 70,000 – is more than double the number
shot according to the event report, which in itself is already hugely excessive.
The tale of the 10 to 12 m tall mountain of bodies is technically absurd,
as we pointed out in the fourth chapter. The claim that 75 ‘ovens’ of the kind
first described by the witness are supposed to have been built stands in contradiction
to the number of victims given by him, since in that case there would
have been (75 × 3,000 =) 225,000 bodies to be burned!
As for the date, the witness maintains that the cremation of the bodies was
finished on September 25 or 26. On this day, the prisoners had built the last
‘oven’ for themselves. On September 26, the Luftwaffe took an aerial photograph
of the area, in which Babi Yar was located. John Ball has published it
with the following commentary: 640
“Photo 2 – September 26th, 1943:
This photo was taken one week after the end of the supposed mass cremations
in the ravine. [641] If 33,000 people were exhumed and burned evidence
of vehicles and foot traffic to supply the fuel should be evident in the
area where the Jewish cemetery meets Babi Yar ravine, however there is
no evidence of traffic either on the end of the narrow road that proceeds to
the ravine from the end of Melnik Street, or on the grass and shrubbery
within or on the sides of the cemetery.”
637 The word “August” appears in the text, which however is an obvious error. Four lines later
September is mentioned in connection with the escape of the prisoners.
638 GARF, 7021-65-6.
639 I. Ehrenburg, V. Grossman, Le Livre Noir, op. cit. (note 24), pp. 80f. According to the Black
Book, not 100 but 300 prisoners were employed in excavating the bodies; the ‘ovens’ held
2,000 bodies instead of 3,000; not 10 but 280 escapees were killed.
640 John Ball, Air Photo Evidence, op. cit. (note 102), p. 107.
641 “Yar” is Russian for ravine.