Eight decades after one of the most infamous Nazi mass slaughters of World War II, the names of 159 SS troops who took part in the killing of Jews during the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine have been revealed.
Nearly 34,000 Jews were killed within 48 hours in Babi Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, when the city was under Nazi occupation in 1941.
SS troops carried out the massacre with local collaborators.
“Babi Yar is the biggest mass grave of the Holocaust … the most quickly filled mass grave,” said Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the supervisory board of Ukraine’s Babi Yar Holocaust memorial centre.
Presidents Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, Isaac Herzog of Israel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany attended a ceremony in Kiev on Wednesday to remember the victims of the massacre.
“It’s hard to breathe at this place – thousands of children took their last breath here,” Zelenskyy said.
“It’s hard to stand here – thousands of bullets knocked people down here in Babi Yar. The earth was trembling from the convulsions of people who were still alive and trying to get out.”
Herzog began his speech with a prayer, saying that “eighty years ago there was no one left here to pray.” He called for combating anti-Semitism, adding that “people mustn’t forget about what catastrophe their silence could lead to”.
Read the article by Yuras Karmanau in The Canberra Times.