The anniversary ceremonies culminate on Wednesday with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, visiting the site and unveiling a modern art installation, the Crystal Wall of Crying. The full museum complex is expected to cost more than $100 million, about half donated by Russian oligarchs, and it is scheduled for completion in 2025.
The massacre at Babyn Yar, also known as Babi Yar, was one of the most notorious of World War II. In late September 1941, soon after German army entered Kyiv, the city’s Jews were told to gather near a train station in order to be resettled. Crowds of people, including many women and children, followed the order but when they arrived with their belongings, they were forced to undress and gather in a ravine. People were shot in small groups, more than 33,000 in a two-day period according to historians, and further mass shootings took place at the site throughout the war.
“I grew up with war stories from my grandparents’ generation,” said Andrej Umansky, a German historian with Ukrainian ancestry working for the private initiative, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. “But students today don’t have the same connection to the Holocaust. For them, it’s totally abstract. To talk about the Holocaust is the same as talking about ancient Rome.”