Never forget

...Thousands of innocent victims – women, the elderly, and children – were walking to the site of their execution. Quite a few of them, though not all, had no idea what awaited them. After all, the German occupation authorities’ posters, plastered all over Kyiv, ordered “all the Jews of the city to gather in Dehtiarivska Street,” but said nothing specific about the purpose of this “gathering,” and vague rumors claimed that the Germans were going to evacuate Jewish population of the Ukrainian capital somewhere – to the West, perhaps even to Germany itself, to work in some sector. Many believed it...

People walked down Dehtiarivska Street, thousands upon thousands, and only when, having already reached the far outskirts of Kyiv, the then little-known locality called Babyn Yar, they heard the order to undress and give up all the personal property (the Nazis were especially interested in jewelry) and saw firing squads with submachine guns, they realized what fate awaited them. Adolf Hitler’s “assembly line of death” went into operation instantly and smoothly. Mothers tried to protect their children with final movements of their bodies, while the executioners extracted gold teeth caps out of still living victims’ mouths. This awful place sounded with groans of the dying for several days. However, the rainy day of September 29, 1941 saw only the launch of the aggressor’s infernal machine aimed at the “final solution to the Jewish question.”

BESIDES UKRAINIAN POLITICIANS, DIPLOMATS, INCLUDING AMBASSADOR OF GERMANY CHRISTOF WEIL, ALSO TOOK PART IN THE OFFICIAL EVENTS DEDICATED TO THE 74th ANNIVERSARY OF THE BABYN YAR MASSACRE

These victims were Jews. The fact is very important, especially because of a ban on saying this clearly which was enforced in the USSR for quite a long time (let us recall how harshly Viktor Nekrasov and Ivan Dziuba were persecuted even in the 1960s for daring to loudly and publicly tell the truth about the hellish events). More importantly, though, they were people. Ukraine will always remember what happened in Babyn Yar in one of the worst crimes in the history of the Holocaust. We should not forget it. Never. For it is allowing such atrocities to go into oblivion that creates openings for such crimes against humanity to repeat, albeit in a new form, but with the same meaning. They condemn some new “enemies” and scream that “the greatness and glory of the Nation is built on blood and hardened in the struggle” and that “the nation should wake up” (as in a 1920s slogan “Wake up, Germany!”), and the whole country should “get up off its knees” (this slogan, meanwhile, is much closer to us in its time of origin...)

Anti-human theory and practice of totalitarian tyrants inevitably generates genocide (“necessarily generates,” as philosophers would say). Genocide of the Jews, Gypsies, Slavs... Where would this “Satanic list” end if Hitler somehow won the war? What nation (except thoroughly filtered “Aryans”) would not be subjected to genocide? It was only the question of priorities! Had Hitler’s counterpart in the Kremlin won, on the other hand, which people would have avoided genocide (based not on race but on class, which admittedly made some difference, but the two ideologies still belonged to the same cannibalistic type). Do not forget: the Babyn Yar, Auschwitz, and Treblinka massacres happened in the same period as ones in Katyn, Bykivnia, Kurapaty, and Demianiv Laz...

Was it the fear of people drawing parallels that forced the Soviet regime to try to hush, “retouch” well into the 1980s the true extent of the crimes committed in Babyn Yar? Incidentally, even the press photographer who took pictures of Viktor Nekrasov and Ivan Dziuba at the time of their speeches at the Holocaust Catastrophe’s site was then made to suffer for it as he lost his job and had to left Kyiv...

There are things which, when speaking about Babyn Yar, should be said with proper clarity. Yes, it is a place of eternal, sacred, and sad memory for the Jewish people. However, we should not forget that thousands upon thousands of other victims perished there as well: Ukrainian nationalists (including Olena Teliha and her husband Mykhailo), soldiers of the Soviet Army, underground fighters – people who, despite differing in ethnic origin, were all destined to die by the Nazis cruel plan. The exact number of people executed there has not been determined yet (it was at least 70,000, but there is some evidence that no less than 250,000 were killed on the site!).

PRIME MINISTER ARSENII YATSENIUK WAS THE CHIEF GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE AT THE MONUMENT TO VICTIMS OF THE MASSACRE ON THIS DAY. “WE HONOR AND WE REMEMBER. AS THE GOVERNMENT OF UKRAINE, WE WILL NOT ALLOW A REPETITION OF SUCH TRAGEDIES, AND WE TAKE TOUGH MEASURES TO SUPPRESS ANY ATTEMPT TO INCITE ANTI-SEMITISM OR RACIAL HATRED, ANY ATTEMPT TO VIOLATE THE RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS OF MAN AND CITIZEN,” YATSENIUK DECLARED. HEAD OF THE KYIV OBLAST STATE ADMINISTRATION VOLODYMYR SHANDRA JOINED THE HEAD OF GOVERNMENT AS THEY LAID WREATHS AT THE SITE

I see establishing “ethnic composition” of the victims as a wrong approach. It is equally wrong to blame our people for the allegedly “inherent” ancient “anti-Semitism,” which, some say, was one of the causes of the tragedy. Mutual understanding between Ukraine and Israel as nations and the Ukrainians and Jews as two people closely related by centuries of shared history is the best refutation of this sacrilegious claim.

The Old Testament, the holy book of the Jews and Christians alike, contains such passionate words: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem...” (then the punishment from God and sorrow awaits my people). Of course, the holy city of the Jews, Muslims, and Christians cannot be equated with Babyn Yar, a place of world mourning. And yet, let us say to ourselves: “If I forget thee, O Babyn Yar...”