Ukraine marks solemn 60th anniversary of Babyn Yar massacre (10/07/01)

Ukraine marks solemn 60th anniversary of Babyn Yar massacre

by Maryna Makhnonos
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - Ukraine marked the 60th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre on September 29 with top officials and news media reports drawing parallels between Nazi atrocities and today's terrorist attacks against humanity.

President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine said that modern terrorists follow Nazi methods. He said mass killings of civilians are based on "boundless and ruthless terrorism," which is the most severe crime against humanity.

Mr. Kuchma pledged Ukraine's support for U.S. efforts to build a global anti-terrorist coalition. "We must confront it together, in a coordinated way that would use every country's potential," he said in an appeal to Ukrainians carried by local media.

After unveiling a monument to children killed at Babyn Yar, Mr. Kuchma also urged all nations to contribute to the peaceful development of mankind. "Every nation can bring its contribution to mankind's development," the president said. "There cannot be anybody superior or anybody inferior."

The bronze monument includes three figures of broken and abandoned dolls that symbolize the fate of the estimated 40,000 children killed at Babyn Yar during World War II at the time of the Nazi occupation of Kyiv.

"We want this monument to be the evidence of fascism's evil," said Kyiv Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko. "We have no right to forget anything and will do all possible not to repeat such a tragedy anywhere on the planet."

The Babyn Yar massacre began in late September 1941 when Nazi forces occupied the Ukrainian capital and ordered its Jews to gather with their clothes and all their valuables, creating the impression that the Jews were to be taken elsewhere. The Jews were then marched to Babyn Yar and shot.

More than 30,000 Jews were killed in just 36 hours. A total of 100,000 to 200,000 people, including Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Roma, were killed at Babyn Yar.

According to a local television documentary, Nazi statistics said that about 150,000 Jews lived in Kyiv at the start of the Nazi occupation in 1941; 20 were left in 1942.

"The tragedy of Babyn Yar has become an eternal page in the black annals of genocide - an this extreme form of terrorism brought to the level of state policy," President Kuchma said. "The people and forces who want to resurrect this terrible ghost in our times cannot be justified or forgiven," he underscored.

Dozens of people, including elderly survivors of the Babyn Yar massacre and representatives of Jewish organizations from abroad, attended the anniversary ceremony on September 30.

The president, government officials and foreign diplomats laid wreaths at the memorial to Nazi victims and unveiled a cornerstone for a Jewish Heritage community center that will include the history of the Jewish people and the Babyn Yar massacre.

"This museum will show that we are alive and that we will live," said Ilia Levitas of the Ukrainian Jewish Council.

"Jewish life is thriving anew in Ukraine, despite the brutality of the Nazi excesses, and despite the repression of communism," said Gene Ribakoff, president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee that sponsors the Jewish community in Ukraine.

"That such boundless hope can spring from such infinite darkness is enormously uplifting, particularly now when the free world confronts the dark tyranny of terrorism," Mr. Ribakoff said, according to the AJJDC's statement.

The Babyn Yar anniversary in independent Ukraine was marked nationwide this year - in sharp contrast to Soviet days. Most newspapers devoted issues to the tragedy.

The nationwide 1 + 1 TV channel on September 29 broadcast a special TV link between Ukraine, the United States, Russia, Germany and Israel with stories about Babyn Yar survivors and Nazi atrocities.

"As a German citizen, I think that Germany and further generations showed that we are obliged to live with those terrible events in mind, that the policy of responsibility and morality is the only way ... [that we must] do everything for all this not to be repeated," said Germany's ambassador to Ukraine, Dietmar Stuedemann, speaking on the TV program.

The station devoted half of the program to the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States, discussing racial, ethnic, political and religious intolerance. Station officials said in a statement: "All such tragic events ... define the outlook of the future. ... The world will never be the same after the terrorist acts in New York."

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