By akademiotoelektronik, 27/02/2023

Babi Yar: "The first big massacre of the Shoah by bullets"

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"A policeman told me to undress and pushed me to the edge of the pit where another group awaited their fate. But before the shooting started, I was so scared that I fell into the pit. I fell on the dead. At first, I didn't understand anything: where was I? How had I got there? I thought I was going mad. The execution continued and people were still falling. I I came to my senses and understood everything. I felt my arms, my legs, my belly, my head. I wasn't even hurt. I pretended to be dead. I was above "people killed or injured. Some were breathing, some were moaning. Suddenly I heard a child cry out 'Mom'. It sounded like my little girl. I burst into tears."

In January 1946, Dina Pronicheva testified at the bar of a court in kyiv, Ukraine. She is one of the few survivors of the Babi Yar massacre. Faced with fifteen members of the German police placed in the dock, she tells how she managed to extract herself from the corpses and escape one of the worst mass executions of the Second World War.

Just over four years earlier, on September 19, 1941, kyiv fell to the German army. Nearly 100,000 Jews managed to flee the Ukrainian city. For those who remain, it is the beginning of the nightmare. While explosions take place in the city, the occupation authorities decide in retaliation to exterminate the Jews of the city. The latter are invited to present themselves on September 29 near a train station, on the outskirts of kyiv, in order to be "resettled" elsewhere. Posters are posted. Recalcitrants are threatened with death. It's a trap.

Many of them go to this summons. A sad parade begins. Ukrainian engineer Fedir Pihido, quoted by Dutch historian Karel Berkhoff in his book "Harvest of Despair – Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule" attends the scene: "And the children – my God, there were so many "Children! All this marched, laden with luggage and children. Here and there, old people, sick people who did not have the strength to move on their own, were carried on carts without assistance, no doubt by wires or girls. Some were crying, others were trying to console. Most were walking, lost in themselves, silent, looking condemned. It was a terrible sight."

"There's a whole journey"

All are taken to Babi Yar, which means "old woman's ravine" or "grandmother's ravine". "It was a network of ditches outside the city. It was a shooting range a little out of the way, out of sight. People had already been shot there by Soviet NKVD troops before," describes Boris Czerny, professor of Russian literature and civilization at the University of Caen, specialist in the Jewish worlds of Eastern Europe. "There is a whole process that takes place from the place of assembly. People are asked to take with them objects that seem important to them. There is then a post where they must leave their identity document, another their backpack and finally a last one where they have to undress", specifies this specialist.

The victims are then led in small groups into the ravine. Members of Einsatzgruppe C – a mobile extermination unit –, assisted by two police regiments and Ukrainian nationalists, opened fire. The shooting continued all day and the next day. In two days, 33,771 victims, mostly Jews, were murdered, according to reports sent to Berlin by Einsatzgruppe C. "This killing could have taken place in a very short time because most of those who committed it had already participated in mass murders. They were very coordinated with each other and supported, "describes historian Karel Berkhoff, professor at the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, based in Amsterdam.

A month earlier, 23,600 Jews from Kamenets-Podolski, a Ukrainian town near the Hungarian border, suffered the same fate. But Babi Yar marks a turning point in its scale and its development. "For the first time in history, a major European city will lose almost all of its Jewish population in a premeditated assassination," said Karel Berkhoff.

For his colleague Boris Czerny, this date also represents "the first great massacre of what will be called the Holocaust by bullets, even if there were others before. It inaugurates the systematic massacres of the Jewish population in ditches. It serves as an experiment in setting up the following ones. This systematization of the procedure will then be taken up in other massacres that took place in Ukraine." Between 1941 and 1944, nearly one and a half million Jews from Ukraine were murdered. Nearly 80% of them will be shot.

In Babi Yar, executions continued well after September 1941. Nearly 100,000 people died there throughout the occupation: Jews, Poles, Gypsies, opponents of the Nazis, mental patients, prisoners of war, etc The Nazis are trying to erase the traces. In 1943, Soviet prisoners were forced to exhume and cremate the corpses of Babi Yar. They themselves are executed so as not to leave any witnesses.

A long way to restore memory

After the war, this past remains in silence. The ravine is a wild dump in the open air, as Boris Czerny recounts: "Objects of the victims came to the surface, which the inhabitants of Kiev came to glean or children in search of gold objects." Nothing is made to keep their memory alive. In the 1960s, the authorities even decided to fill the place with a mixture of water and mud. The result is a disaster. One of the dikes collapses causing a landslide that kills dozens.

In the USSR, the singularity of the massacre of the Jews should not be highlighted. It must be shown that the Soviet people suffered as a whole, without distinction. In 1976, a first monument was erected, but it paid homage without many details to "citizens of the city of Kiev and [to] prisoners of war" killed at Babi Yar between 1941 and 1943. "The main reason was an anti-Semitic notion according to which the Jews had been and remained foreigners," said Karel Berkhoff. "This event had not been erased from memory, but commemorations were rare and remained vague on the origin of the main victims." In September 1991, a sculpture in the shape of a menorah [a seven-branched candlestick, Ed] was finally inaugurated by the Jewish community.

In the years that followed, other monuments took their place in the former ravine, which had become an ordinary park. They pay homage to the massacred children, to the Gypsies, to priests or even to Ukrainian patriots. The idea of ​​a memorial dedicated to the Jews emerges, but nothing advances. We have to wait until 2016 for this project to materialize. But there again, the controversy swells. Some wonder about its funding. Russian billionaires have got their hands on the wallet, including the oligarch Mikhail Fridman, a banker by profession, founder of the Russian Jewish Congress, who also has Ukrainian and Israeli nationalities. Others denounce a "Disneyland of the Shoah" by pointing to the idea of ​​the controversial Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky who envisaged, using video and digital techniques, to put visitors to the future museum in the shoes of executioners or victims of Babi Yar.

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"Restore the criminal history of this place"

This concept has since been abandoned. The focus today has been on creating a museum, modeling the scene of the massacre and collecting archives. To carry out this mission, the French priest Patrick Desbois has notably been appointed director of the academic council of the future memorial, which must be completed by 2026. At the head of the Yahad-In Unum association, he has identified for nearly Twenty Years of Jewish Extermination Sites in Ukraine and Collecting Testimonies. "I accepted this job because they were finally doing something. This is the first time that a shooting site will be preserved and enhanced in this way with an effort to find the list of victims", explains the father Woodland. "We must also establish that of the killers because otherwise it is as if it was Babi Yar who had killed the Jews. We must restore the criminal history of this place", he adds.

By investigating these mass executions, this grandson of a deportee was able to realize how these events had been erased: "When there is a camp, barbed wire, traces, something to see as Auschwitz, people come back, but when there are only mass graves, people don't come back. In the history of humanity, when people are shot and put in graves, that does not remember." Since Babi Yar, massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans and Syria have reproduced the same processes as during the Holocaust by bullets. For the head of Yahad-In Unum, the future memorial is thus not only turned towards the past, but above all towards the future: "If there is one today in Kiev, that may mean that there will also be some one day in Raqqa. It is a signal for those who today carry out mass murders such as Daesh or Al-Qaeda. These killers must be told: 'we will come back'."

In the fall of 1943, the writer Vassili Grossman, born in Ukraine into a Jewish family, got wind of the massacres perpetrated in his region of origin. In an article, when he had no news of his mother, he wrote: "There are no Jews in Ukraine. Nowhere – Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, Yagotin – in any big city, in none of the hundreds of small towns or thousands of villages, you will not see the black eyes filled with tears, of little girls; you will not hear the painful voice of an old woman; you will not see the dirty face of a hungry baby . All is silence. All is peaceful. A whole people has been savagely massacred." Now is the time to give them a voice and a face.

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