Ukraine has hosted memorial services to remember those massacred 75 years ago at the Babi Yar ravine.
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Ukraine has hosted memorial services to remember those massacred 75 years ago at the Babi Yar ravine.
In the space of two days in September 1941, 33,771 Jews were slaughtered at the site as part of what the Nazis labelled the Final Solution in Europe.
That autumn, more than 100,000 Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and other so-called undesirables were killed at the ravine, which lies on the outskirts of Kyiv.
“The tragedy of the Babi Yar is a wake-up for the whole humanity. Any regime, which tramples human rights and freedoms, embodies a threat to the very humanity,” Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko, told international dignitaries, which included the President of Germany, Joachim Gauck.
During the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, notices such as this one were published, calling on Jews to gather with money, valuables and warm clothes. Many thought they were being relocated. Instead they became statistics in the biggest massacre carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators in the Soviet Union.