The Holocaust Memorial Undone By Another War

April 11, 2022

(The New Yorker) – After reclaiming Kyiv, Soviet authorities gave a group of foreign journalists a tour of Babyn Yar. The footage of that tour, along with pictures taken earlier by a Nazi photographer and a number of photos taken by a special Soviet state commission which were kept secret for seventy years, made up the visual record from the time. In 1946, while the Nuremberg trials were under way, a court in Kyiv tried fifteen German officers who had committed atrocities in Ukraine. Several witnesses and survivors testified. The court sentenced twelve of the defendants to death; they were hanged in the city’s central square, now known as Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square. But following those executions the Soviet Union banned any public discussion of what had happened to Kyiv’s Jews. (Read More)