Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Babi Yar

The focus of the Holocaust memorial eve service at Conservative Temple Beit Israel in Netanya on Yom Hashoah, organized by Rabbi Ervin Birnbaum, was the massacre of Jews at the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev on September 29, 1941.

Only days after capturing Kiev from the retreating Russian forces, notices appeared around Kiev ordering Jews to appear at a certain location on the following day, with their papers and wordly goods. Failure to report or being found anywhere else would result in death. Of the 100,000 or so Jews residing in the city area at that time, most families obeyed the order. The Jews of Kiev and most of western Russia were quite oblivious of the plans and intentions of the Nazis and had no idea that this was a death sentence, most believed that they were going to be relocated or resettled elsewhere, some believed that they would be organized into forced labor, but very few realized the true intentions of this order, and those who warned against going were considered as marginal and even deranged.

The location for the assembly was next to a cemetary and a railway station. Once in the crowd there was no way of going backwards. The Germans were very cunning, they had trains chugging back and forth all day, convincing the Jews that they were being transported elsewhere. There are several eyewitness accounts of what happened next to the Jews, they were separated into groups of ten and then led under guard down a narrow defile, with Ukranian volunteers and German soldiers above beating them, they were told to leave their luggage, clothes and goods to the right, food to the left and then they were forced to disrobe and were pushed onto a ledge. When they had occupied the ledge above the steep ravine they were shot by machine guns from across the ravine and they fell onto the huge pile of corpses below. Many were not dead and the whole mass moved and screamed. One woman survived because she threw herself off the ledge before the bullet caught her. Soldiers then walked across the bodfies stealing the gold teeth and rings and shooting anyone who moved. Then they threw sand down onto the mass of bodies. She managed to survive and under cover of darkness made her escape.

This was the greatest single massacre of the Holocaust, where 38,000 Jews were murdered in 36 hours! Over the period of a year ca. 100,000 were murdered there. But, ca. 500,000 Jews were murdered in a period of one year by the four Einsatzgruppen (special) units that roamed the area behind the German lines. And ca. 70,000 were murdered and thrown alive into the huge pit at the Ninth Fort at Kovno over a period of three months, and 35,000 were murdered by German and Latvian collaborators in the forest of Ponar outside Riga. Of course, 2.5 million were murdered at Auschwitz during its operation (1941-5) and many other concentration camps (thousands have now been identified) operated throughout Europe.

Yes, the loss of 3,000 Americans at the Twin Towers in NY in 2001 was a terrible tragedy. But, to put it into perspective, the 6 million Jews killed throughout Europe by all means of terrible tortures amounted to ca. 2,000 Twin Towers, or one every day for over 5 years!

For further information about the Babi Yar massacre I recommend reading the famous poem "Babi Yar" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the historical work "Babi Yar" by Anatoly Kuznetzov and the truly amazing novel, "The White Hotel" by D.M. Thomas.

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