Halya Coynash
It is 75 years since the Nazi massacre of almost 34 thousand Ukrainian Jews in Babyn Yar, then a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv, and 25 years since the end of the Soviet Union and its lies about the Victims of Babyn Yar and about the Holocaust
On 28 September 1941 notices appeared around Kyiv ordering all Jews to come the next morning with their possessions and documents to the corner of Melnykova and Degtyryovska St. Those who did not, the announcement read, would be executed.
Around 150 people found refuge with non-Jewish friends or neighbours. How many were refused will never be known. Reports say that many of the families who came to Babyn Yar did so hoping that nothing terrible could be planned on the eve of Yom Kippur which fell that year on Oct 1. People had been told to bring warm clothes, and probably hoped that they were being deported, since there was a railway nearby.
Instead Nazi Einsatzgruppen and local collaborators stripped men, women and children naked, forced them to lie on the bodies of other victims, and killed them.