Israel marks 70 years since Babi Yar massacre

[scandal 951]

Israel marks 70 years since Babi Yar massacre

By ARON HELLER, Associated Press – 1 hour ago

JERUSALEM (AP) — With tears in his eyes, Michael Sidko laid a wreath of flowers at Israel's official Holocaust memorial during a solemn ceremony Thursday marking 70 years since a World War II massacre he barely escaped.

Sidko was six when he was taken with his family to the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev, Ukraine — then part of the Soviet Union — to be murdered along with the rest of that city's Jews. In the two-day killing spree in September 1941, Nazi troops gunned down more than 33,000 Jews and buried them in mounds of dirt.

Among those murdered were Sidko's mother and two of his siblings. He and his older brother, Grisha, were among the few who managed to escape the killing fields.

"How is it that everyone was killed and only we survived?" he asked, hands quivering. "I still can't believe what happened there and how I managed to get away. I thank God I am here today."

At 76, he is one of the only living survivors of an atrocity that has become one of the defining events of the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews.

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a turning point in the German plan to "solve the Jewish problem." Einsatzgruppen paramilitary death squads were sent out to follow the German armies. Babi Yar was one of the first mass killing sites.

Of the 160,000 Jews in Kiev prior to the Nazi invasion, some 100,000 managed to flee. The rest were ordered to be murdered.

At Babi Yar, the Jews were forced to hand over valuables, strip and line up on the edge of the ravine. They were then shot with automatic fire and covered by dirt. The Nazis gunned down 33,771 Jews over two days.

Similar mass murders took place throughout the former Soviet Union.

After the war, a 1961 poem about the massacre by Yevgeni Yevtushenko was turned into music, and Babi Yar became a symbol of Nazi evil.

"At that area, the mass murder systematically started and for many years it was denied," said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. "That very famous piece of poetry started a new process and immediately it caught the minds and hearts of so many people in the world."

Babi Yar also served as a slaughterhouse for non-Jews, such as Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war. According to a Soviet estimate, 100,000 people were murdered there.

Sidko said he was gathered along with a small group of children while the adults were being slaughtered. For some inexplicable reason, a German guard allowed him and his 13-year-old brother to break off from the group, and then they fled.

They returned home, but a Ukrainian neighbor reported them to the Gestapo and they were sent to a concentration camp. The brothers escaped that as well and were on the run for two more years, until the end of the war. Michael Sidko's brother Grisha is no longer alive.

At Thursday's ceremony, Sidko rekindled the eternal flame at Yad Vashem alongside Ukrainian Minister of Culture Mykhailo Kulynyak.

"It was hard," he said, in Russian. "I saw my whole life before my eyes."

Despite Israel's troubled history with Ukraine, Yad Vashem is set to sign a breakthrough agreement with the country's national archives that it hopes will shed more light on the massacres and help the Holocaust memorial in its project of collecting the names of all 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Among the material in the Ukrainian archives is documentation from village, city and regional administrations, from which it is expected that details about the daily life of Jews before and after the Nazi invasion can be drawn.

"This is a significant achievement," Shalev said.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

There's a Babi Yar memorial park in Denver near Cherry Creek, where I used to live. There's a large Russian Jewish immigrant community there. It's a very peaceful place even as it commemorates a very violent period in history. I used to go there to read and study sometimes.

[Captain Oates 911]

There's a Babi Yar memorial park in Denver near Cherry Creek, where I used to live. There's a large Russian Jewish immigrant community there. It's a very peaceful place even as it commemorates a very violent period in history. I used to go there to read and study sometimes.

Oh it was you - and I thought it was some crazy introspective depressed woman who needed to get a hobby

You should have introduced yourself to confirm/dispel that impression

I have been to a lot of the world war 1 graves in Europe - my grandad is one of the 300,000 with no known graves at Arras. They don't speak, They don't come through, there are no spirits. I have been to Saxenhausen too - with the grandson of a wehrmacht officer - a pal of mine - there was nothing. Only the cold and the mist. My dad was 18 months old on the 3rd May 1917.

Dead is dead - although at 3.45 am on the 3rd May 2017 I will be at Oppy Wood near Arras if you want to join me. There will be no voices.

Edited October 7, 2011 by Austin Devon

[IR5FORMUMSIE 850]

Oh it was you - and I thought it was some crazy introspective depressed woman who needed to get a hobby

You should have introduced yourself to confirm/dispel that impression

I have been to a lot of the world war 1 graves in Europe - my grandad is one of the 300,000 with no known graves at Arras. They don't speak, They don't come through, there are no spirits. I have been to Saxenhausen too - with the grandson of a wehrmacht officer - a pal of mine - there was nothing. Only the cold and the mist. My dad was 18 months old on the 3rd May 1917.

Dead is dead - although at 3.45 am on the 3rd May 2017 I will be at Oppy Wood near Arras if you want to join me. There will be no voices.

The individual in question will be unable to join you, Alan. The entrance to the closest public transit terminal might be a good place start. As for the voices? Stainless steel colander, anyone?

[Captain Oates 911]

The individual in question will be unable to join you, Alan. The entrance to the closest public transit terminal might be a good place start. As for the voices? Stainless steel colander, anyone?

praps she is on the 'no fly ' list anyway

atheists often look for signs of the spirit world - in that they are about as successful as Crespo Dollar's quest for pious poverty

Edited October 7, 2011 by Austin Devon

[IR5FORMUMSIE 850]

praps she is on the 'no fly ' list anyway

....come to think of it, most women's trousers are 'no fly'

atheists often look for signs of the spirit world - in that they are about as successful as Crespo Dollar's quest for pious poverty

She's on the no land list. As for women's trousers, I'm going to skirt the issue of gender, just like the poster.

[Captain Oates 911]

She's on the no land list. As for women's trousers, I'm going to skirt the issue of gender, just like the poster.

What a marvelous person you are to have given me a phrase like 'skirt the issue of gender'. Not being a real American (for this purpose), I spotted it at once.

I will cherish it forever. My wife hates puns, or any other small dogs, and she thinks irony is like coppery, so I get few opportunities to indulge my juvenile love of these

Edited October 7, 2011 by Austin Devon

[IR5FORMUMSIE 850]

What a marvelous person you are to have given me a phrase like 'skirt the issue of gender'. Not being a real American (for this purpose), I spotted it at once.

I will cherish it forever. My wife hates puns, or any other small dogs, and she thinks irony is like coppery, so I get few opportunities to indulge my juvenile love of these

You are far too kind. With a movie camera in hand, you, too, can be a reel American. Irony is absolutely nothing like coppery, in fact, it has little to do with the local constabulary. If you have already spotted your skirt then might I suggest a tampon. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's about time that I Morecambe and Wise'd up and took out the rubbish.