KYIV COMMEMORATES 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF BABYNYAR TRAGEDY
Kalyna Kardash
Kyiv, Ukraine
Kyiv is a tale of two cities. Its grand roads, bourgeoning hipster scene, and numerous buildings under (seemingly constant) renovation give off an air of a bustling European city. But scratch a little deeper and one uncovers a metropolis currently experiencing much hardship, and hiding a not-so-distant,tragic,past unknown to most of its inhabitants.
Perhaps most symbolic of this Kyivan dichotomy is BabynYar. Today it is the site ofa park not far from the city centre, but 75 years ago it bore witness to one of the biggest instances of mass murder in human history.
Most Kyivansare unaware of the magnitude of killing that took place in this park through which they casuallywalk their dogs and infant children, hurry through to catch a bus or taxi, or simply stroll in, stopping at a bench or grassy patch to take in some fresh air and relax.
But on September 29th, 1941 the pace of people walking the same ground was much brisker, clenched with a fear of the unknown as bullets could be heard continuously firing in the distance. First their documents were burned. Then they were stripped and beaten, having their most valuable possessions taken from them. And then, in a dehumanized state, they were shot. 33,771 innocent men, women, and children were systematically lined up row after row, falling to their death in a massive ditch, a key feature of today’s park. The entire operation lasted 2 days.
The victims were the Jews of Kyiv, and their killers were the occupying Nazi forces and SS troops. They were but one group of over 100,000 murdered atBabynYar.
The 75th anniversary of the BabynYar tragedy was commemorated in Kyivat the end of September by a six day international conference and youth project entitled “BabynYar: The Memory and Modern World.” The BabynYar Project is a non-governmental commemoration implemented by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter in cooperation with the National Organizing Committee for the 75th Anniversary of the BabynYar Tragedy (under the patronage of the President of Ukraine) and the World Jewish Congress.
The Project and associated conference took place at Ukrainian House (Ukrainskij Dim) and featured several prominent scholars including Timothy Snyder of Yale Universityand Norman Naimark of Stanford University. In his introductory address, entitled “BabynYar and the Holocaust: Remembering the Future,” Professor Snyder guided the audience through key factors that led to the realization of the Holocaust on Ukrainian territory, which includedwar, an anti-Semitic ideology of extermination, and a state of lawlessness and destruction in Ukraine and the European continent as a whole.
“I think the Holocaust was only possible when Germany expanded its colonial war to the east, and as a result was able to undertake massive killing there,” said Snyder. “BabynYar expands German responsibility [for the Holocaust] because creating situations where you bring in others as collaborators is also their responsibility,” he said. “[The danger is] that Germans would export responsibility for the Holocaust to other nations when we stress [on the question of responsibility] for parts of the Holocaust such as BabynYar,” he added.
In total over 100,000 people were killed at BabynYar, including Ukrainian nationalists, gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, Communists, the disabled, and ethnic minorities.The infamous question of Ukrainian collaboration in and responsibility for the Holocaust in Ukrainewas also raised. Stating that one “cannot ask Ukrainians to bear all responsibility for the Holocaust, [and that] everyone has to bear some responsibility,” Snyder emphasized that, “no nation can have a healthy society without grappling with uncomfortable facts of its past.”
During the conference it was regularly stressed that more research needed to be done on who the “collaborators” were during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine. It was acknowledged that while locals did take part in auxiliary police operations, “it was not exclusively ethnic Ukrainians, [that] there were Russians and Crimean Tatars too.” In fact, Snyder pointed out, “a very large number of people in the auxiliary groups were members of the communist party,” and that when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, “they did not totally get rid of Communists, that it was not just nationalists who were in the auxiliary policy.”
More focus needs to be put on factuality, rather than myths, Snyder stated. “We need more biographies from the war time,” he urged, “we need to look for [individual] biographies to change the picture of Ukrainians as bystanders.”
Historically, Ukrainian-Jewish relations have been perceived to be riddled with tension. The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, a Canada-based non-profit that works to foster understanding of Ukrainian-Jewish relations, is an attempt to find common ground and common understanding in aspects of the shared history of these two groups.
Today relations between ethnic Ukrainians and Jews, especially since the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity, have markedly improved, demonstrated by Jewish support for and involvement in the revolution and ensuing war with Russia. In attendance at the conference were Ukrainian-Jewish and Muslim soldiers who spoke about the absence of anti-Semitism and racism in Ukraine often propagated by the Russian media. “We live like brothers on the front,” said one Jewish soldier, who is originally from Crimea but was forced to flee his home after the Russian annexation of the peninsula. “The Ukrainian eats salo, I eat kosher pork, and the Muslim has his halal meat, all under the same roof,” he said.
Since the new Ukrainian government took office in 2014 the theme of remembrance has enjoyed a renewed focus. “[The] Euromaidan [Revolution of Dignity] symbolized a desire to break with the Soviet past,” said Dr. VolodymyrViatrovych, who heads the Institute of National Memory in Ukraine. “The government has taken an unprecedented role in planning the 75th anniversary commemorations for BabynYar,” he noted, adding that he considers it “important for the government to take a leading role in commemorations to end the ‘victimization’ competition, to acknowledge that it was both Jews and non-Jews who were killed there, and to have an honest, open conversation of what happened, not denying any narrative or emphasizing one over the other.”
Deconstruction of soviet myths and identity, as well as de-communization,have become a central theme of the Institute. It has led the charge on new commemorative initiatives, such as recognizing May 8th as a day of remembrance for the Second World War (as opposed to the soviet tradition of celebrating “Victory Day” on May 9th). These new practices are significant for WWII tragedies such as the Holocaust, noted Viatrovych, as previously events like BabynYar did not fit the soviet narrative of the ‘Great Patriotic War.’
“Remembrance of BabynYar was first forbidden,” Viatrovych explained. Those killed at BabynYar, including Ukrainian nationalists, Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), and Jews, did not deserve to be commemorated according to the narrative of the Great Patriotic War. It was not until theYushchenko presidency that the issue of memory gained prominence and sites such as BabynYar were formally sanctioned as areas of national remembrance. When ex-President Viktor Yanukovych took office in 2010 there was a marked slow-down and reversal of these policies, characterized by a “re-sovietization” of historical memory.
Presently, Ukraine is “entering a new stage” of the politics of memory, “moving away from community-led initiatives” such as BabynYar, said Viatrovych. BabynYar is largely representative of a larger issue at hand, the competition of memory, which arises amongst individual groups competing for prominence in the sphere of remembrance and victimization. This kind of competition can be observed throughout the BabynYar territory, which is marked by an uncoordinated assortment of commemorative monuments scattered throughout, each paying tribute to different victims.
To help rectify the situation an International Architectural Competition for the “complex integration of the memorial area in Kyiv” was announced, the results of which were declaredat the conference. The purpose of the competition was “to create a clearly marked out space, in which both those who are coming with the explicit goal of honoring the memory of the dead and regular local residents would at once feel the connection of this place to the tragic history of the Holocaust and other tragedies that had happened there,” as well as to “create a space of reflection and acknowledgement of the extreme inhumanity and tragic events that occurred at this site in the past, and to unite contemporary citizens of Ukraine of all ethnic backgrounds in the spirit of mutual empathy for past sufferings, affirmation of the value of every individual human life, and aspirations for a just and humane society.”
In total 32 designs from 15 countries around the world were submitted, and seven were announced as finalists. However, the jury “did not feel that any one entry answered the issues raised in the brief in a comprehensive way, and all winning projects left unanswered questions.” Consequently the jury decided to award two second place prizes – to entries submitted from Slovenia and a joint submission from Colombia and France – to the entries that best addressed the main issues.
But there was another issue keeping the competition from fully materializing: the competition client (The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter) does not own the territory of BabynYar, and is therefore not legally entitled to implement such a project independently. An official handout stated that as a result, “the only course of action is to deploy consistent efforts aimed at persuading the landowners and authorized land users, as well as other stakeholders and the wider public, of the necessity of having this project realized,” with the competition seen as a first step in this direction.
Today, one of the more prominent features of BabynYar is a giant, lone menorah that stands to remind passers-by of the massacre of Jews that occurred there. But the figure of over 33,000 murdered in two days can be difficult to comprehend in its totality. For the killers, too, the task might have seemed overwhelming, and for this reason was purposely made easier by the dehumanization of the victims to a semi-barbaric state before they were killed, explained Professor Norman Naimark, a leading expert on genocide studies.
Snyder also touched upon this point, explaining that the sheer size and resultant impersonal nature of the event could be reversed if one imagines one victim with something on them which humanizes them, such as a pair of shoes or a child with a toy. This helps us to better comprehend the horrifying nature of the atrocity as well as how the Jews were deprived of their individuality in order to become easier to kill.
BabynYar was but one aspect of one genocide that occurred on Ukrainian territory in the twentieth century. The Holocaust, together with the 1932-33 Holodomor, and the deportation of Crimean Tartars in 1944 were three genocides which traumatized the Ukrainian nation. Unfortunately, war and death en masse is not something that was left in Ukraine’s past; today a prolonged war with Russia continues to ravage eastern Ukraine, while Crimea remains annexed by occupying Russian forces.
BabynYar serves as an important example of what happens when one dangerous ideology is replaced by another, a timely reminder as figures and ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s make a comeback in both Europe and America. “Only [physical] defeat in the war discredited the idea of fascism,” warned Snyder, “and we are now relatively defenceless [to its return] as the idea itself wasn’t actually completely defeated.”
Words to remember as a rogue Russian state fuels far-right movements in Europe, and America faces one of the most pivotal elections in its history.
Perhaps most symbolic of this Kyivan dichotomy is BabynYar. Today it is the site ofa park not far from the city centre, but 75 years ago it bore witness to one of the biggest instances of mass murder in human history. 
The 75th anniversary of the BabynYar tragedy was commemorated in Kyivat the end of September by a six day international conference and youth project entitled “BabynYar: The Memory and Modern World.” The BabynYar Project is a non-governmental commemoration implemented by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter in cooperation with the National Organizing Committee for the 75th Anniversary of the BabynYar Tragedy (under the patronage of the President of Ukraine) and the World Jewish Congress. 
“I think the Holocaust was only possible when Germany expanded its colonial war to the east, and as a result was able to undertake massive killing there,” said Snyder. “BabynYar expands German responsibility [for the Holocaust] because creating situations where you bring in others as collaborators is also their responsibility,” he said. “[The danger is] that Germans would export responsibility for the Holocaust to other nations when we stress [on the question of responsibility] for parts of the Holocaust such as BabynYar,” he added.
Today relations between ethnic Ukrainians and Jews, especially since the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity, have markedly improved, demonstrated by Jewish support for and involvement in the revolution and ensuing war with Russia. In attendance at the conference were Ukrainian-Jewish and Muslim soldiers who spoke about the absence of anti-Semitism and racism in Ukraine often propagated by the Russian media. “We live like brothers on the front,” said one Jewish soldier, who is originally from Crimea but was forced to flee his home after the Russian annexation of the peninsula. “The Ukrainian eats salo, I eat kosher pork, and the Muslim has his halal meat, all under the same roof,” he said.
Deconstruction of soviet myths and identity, as well as de-communization,have become a central theme of the Institute. It has led the charge on new commemorative initiatives, such as recognizing May 8th as a day of remembrance for the Second World War (as opposed to the soviet tradition of celebrating “Victory Day” on May 9th). These new practices are significant for WWII tragedies such as the Holocaust, noted Viatrovych, as previously events like BabynYar did not fit the soviet narrative of the ‘Great Patriotic War.’
In total 32 designs from 15 countries around the world were submitted, and seven were announced as finalists. However, the jury “did not feel that any one entry answered the issues raised in the brief in a comprehensive way, and all winning projects left unanswered questions.” Consequently the jury decided to award two second place prizes – to entries submitted from Slovenia and a joint submission from Colombia and France – to the entries that best addressed the main issues.
