This week marks the 85th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre.
As we remember the murders, we must also confront the deliberate effort to erase the victims’ identities and distort their story.
The Soviet regime obscured the fact that they were murdered as Jews; today, Russian propaganda distorts the meaning of Nazism to serve the state’s purposes. In the face of this exploitation of history, our duty is to return to the facts and to the people behind them.
On September 29 and 30, 1941, German forces, aided by local collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews at Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv.
In just two days, the lives of children, parents, and grandparents were cut short, and an entire world of families and community was destroyed.
The precise figure, recorded in the perpetrators’ own report, remains chilling evidence of the systematic nature of the killing. Over the next two years, tens of thousands more people, both Jews and non-Jews, were murdered there.
Babyn Yar became a symbol of a vast chapter of the Holocaust whose place in public memory remains far smaller than its scale warrants.
Auschwitz is etched into the world’s consciousness as the symbol of the Holocaust of European Jewry. Its railway tracks, train cars, and gate have become an almost universally recognized visual language.
Babyn Yar is its complementary symbol, the other half of the story: that of some two million Jews murdered in mass shootings and related massacres in territories seized by Germany from the Soviet Union.
This was the “Holocaust by bullets,” carried out at thousands of killing sites and mass graves in the forests, fields, and ravines of Eastern Europe. Restoring it to the center of remembrance helps redress a historical injustice that persisted for decades after the murders.
These victims did not board a train or pass through a camp gate. They were led to their deaths close to where they had lived. The journey from home, shop, or synagogue to the killing pit was sometimes horrifyingly short.
Anyone seeking to understand the Holocaust must also understand this geography: everyday landscapes turned into sites of annihilation, and entire communities erased. Babyn Yar brings these people and communities into view, restoring to the history of the Holocaust those whose memory was pushed to its margins.
Five years ago, I was part of an international team working to commemorate the massacre at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. The ceremony was attended by the presidents of Ukraine, Israel, and Germany: Volodymyr Zelensky, Isaac Herzog, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Construction was in full swing, and new memorials were being inaugurated. It seemed that Jewish memory was finally regaining a presence at a site from which it had been excluded for decades.
The Soviet regime subordinated the memory of the victims to the story of Soviet suffering and victory, obscuring the fact that they were murdered because they were Jewish.
The monument erected at Babyn Yar in 1976 made no mention of their Jewish identity. Natan Sharansky described this as a double crime: the murder of the Jews by the Nazis, and the suppression of their memory by the Soviet regime.
Loss was thus compounded by institutionalized erasure, leaving generations without access to the victims’ full story.
Protecting memory
In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote about the absence of a monument at Babyn Yar. His poem became a protest against the silencing of memory and against antisemitism.
In 1991, a menorah-shaped memorial to the Jewish victims was erected at the site, but the road to establishing a comprehensive memorial center was long. Memorials now stand there, yet the war has halted the momentum of construction and development.
Research continues, even under fire.
In September 2025, the center reported that 1,031 previously unidentified victims’ names had been added to its database since the outbreak of the war. Birth certificates, adoption applications, and court testimony are restoring identities once thought lost.
In the face of erasure, each name restores a person to memory.
A line connects Soviet erasure to Russian propaganda today. Once again, history is subordinated to the needs of the state.
The Kremlin justifies its invasion of Ukraine with the false claim that the country must be “denazified,” exploiting the memory of the victory over Nazism.
A study by Ruslan Kavatsiuk, Oleksiy Makukhin, and Violetta Seleznova, published this month in Eastern European Holocaust Studies, analyzes 4,263 Russian television broadcasts from 2012 to 2024.
The researchers show how “Nazism” became a label used to delegitimize Ukraine and justify military action against it. This, too, is a form of erasure: blurring the historical meaning of Nazism, pushing its victims to the margins, and replacing their story with a narrative that serves the state.
Then, the victims’ Jewish identity was suppressed; today, the memory of their murderers is exploited to justify aggression.
Through my work in Holocaust education and remembrance with March of the Living, I have learned the power of encountering the places themselves. Visiting a town, a synagogue, or a killing site connects historical knowledge to human lives.
To understand what was lost, we must know what existed: families, culture, spiritual life, and daily routines. This is how we counter erasure beyond commemorative ceremonies: by learning about communities, reading testimonies, and remembering names.
Babyn Yar should be a gateway to understanding Eastern European Jewry and its world, while also bearing witness to its destruction.
Ukraine’s efforts to confront this chapter of its past deserve recognition, as does its perseverance in the work of remembrance after more than four years of a devastating war.
On the 85th anniversary of the massacre, our responsibility is to protect memory against erasure, distortion, and manipulation.
That means returning to the facts, supporting research, opening archives, and making their findings accessible; teaching the Holocaust by bullets and learning about the communities that lived before they were murdered.
Behind the name Babyn Yar are tens of thousands of human beings, and beyond it are millions whose stories were buried in the soil of Eastern Europe.
Our duty is to remember their names, their lives, and their Jewish identity, and to ensure that no regime succeeds in bending their story to its own purposes.
The writer is the CEO of March of the Living Israel.