I stood at Babyn Yar weeks ago — now Russian bombs are erasing Jewish history
WEEKS AGO, I was standing at Babyn Yar, waiting for a coach carrying a group of parliamentarians and Jewish leaders from across Europe.
With 100,000 Russian troops on the border, we knew war was likely. But none of us expected rocket fire to hit the site of one of the Shoah’s greatest massacres. “The ground itself is sacred,” one historian told us. Beneath lay the remains of 33,000 Jewish men, women and children, dumped into a mass grave by their Nazi killers.
Now the Babyn Yar memorial has been hit by a Russian missile.
For Putin to destroy such a site hits at the heart of Ukrainian Jewry itself.
In Ukraine, I had heard the last survivor of the massacre, Michael Sidko, tell us that war is the worst thing in the world. I wonder what he thinks now: his nation under attack, the grave containing his mother and siblings desecrated, the fear that in the days and weeks ahead many others across Ukraine stand to suffer as Michael once did under the Nazis.
The extent of the damage to Babyn Yar has not been assessed, but five people are reported dead, and a building at the site has been partly destroyed. Footage shot on the scene shows firefighters walking through a thick cloud of smoke, moving past downed power lines and small fires that burn sporadically. The memorial site has been transformed into a smouldering ruin.
The irony of Putin damaging a deeply significant Jewish site just a week after launching a war to “de-Nazify” Ukraine is obvious. What is no doubt also clear to all those who visited Babyn Yar with me is that again the Russian state is helping to destroy the collective memory of the Shoah. At Babyn Yar, Father Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest who for years who has been working to unearth Einsatzgruppen killing sites in eastern Europe, told us: “The Soviets did all they could to erase this place.”
For 25 years after the massacre, the site remained untouched and unmarked. The Ukrainian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote in 1961: “No gravestone stands on Babyn Yar; Only coarse earth heaped roughly on the gash; Such dread comes over me.” His words were in protest against a plan to build a sports stadium over the mass grave.
The Soviet authorities reprimanded Yevtushenko for his “cosmopolitanism”. Five years later, a small obelisk was built on the site to commemorate the dead below. In 1976, a larger memorial statue was created, but neither acknowledged the antisemitic nature of the killing. It was only in the 1990s that the newly independent Ukrainian began to recognise that Jews were killed for being Jews. Now Russia has invaded and again Jewish history is being erased. Before, it was by totalitarian repression; now, through bombing.
That Jewish history has already been desecrated by Putin as he twists the legacy of the Holocaust to justify his invasion with his claims of “de-nazification”. But whatever atrocities lie in the country’s past, recent years have been very different. The chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, Rabbi Meir Stambler, told me on the eve of war: “Jews are here, we have very good years with our Ukrainian neighbours, we are part of the population. But the ground is soaked with blood over here, Jewish blood.”
In the past five years, Holocaust education has been added to the Ukrainian curriculum. A Jewish Prime Minister and President have been elected. Jews can be found in every layer of public life. Rabbi Stambler told me: “To say that in Ukraine there is more antisemitism than anywhere else, definitely not... it’s just a lie.”
Over the days I spent talking to Jewish leaders from across Ukraine, the overwhelming sense was of a community overcoming its past.