Anger as Kiev council plan to build hotel on genocide site

[Dara bhur gCara]

Euro 2012 football fans may be housed where 33,771 Jews died

The biggest mass murder by shooting of the Holocaust occurred during two days in late September 1941. Then, 33,771 Ukrainian Jews – by the Nazis' own accounts – were ordered to gather at a Jewish cemetery near a ravine called Babi Yar, on the outskirts of the capital, Kiev. They believed they were going to be transported for resettlement in work camps.

Instead they were machine-gunned in small groups by two lines of German SS Einsatzcommando troops assisted by Ukrainian auxiliary police and local Nazi collaborators. Their bodies were pushed into the gorge, where they were later buried.

Now Babi Yar, one of the most sensitive sites for Ukrainian Jews, has been slated by Kiev's city council for the building of a hotel to house visiting football fans for Euro 2012, opening a new chapter in its already controversial history.

[Dara bhur gCara]

The site of the Babi Yar genocide is to be used to build a hotel for Euro 2012. The plan exposes the dark side of Ukraine.

Probably few people in this country have heard of Babi Yar, but if recent proposals by the Kiev city authority go ahead, England soccer fans travelling to the 2012 European Championships to be held in Ukraine may well find themselves staying in a hotel built at the site of one of the most notorious massacres of the second world war.

Between 29 and 30 September 1941, German SS troops assisted by local auxiliaries killed more than 33,000 of Kiev's Jewish inhabitants at a ravine that ran through parkland on the city's periphery. It was the culmination of a genocidal sweep through Ukraine that wiped out one community after another. Eventually, about 700,000 Ukrainian Jews would perish at the hands of the Germans, their Romanian allies, and Ukrainians recruited into police battalions. Thousands of Gypsies were also murdered throughout Ukraine, many at the ravine that became a favourite murder site until the city was liberated.

Babi Yar was the most horrific single act of slaughter, yet for decades after the war there was no memorial there. Groups of Jews gathered annually to commemorate the atrocity, but unofficially. In 1961 the dissident Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko created a stir with a poem lamenting the massacre and the attitude of local people to the fate of the Jews. His poem was later put to music by Dimitri Shostakovitch in one of the composers most powerful and affecting compositions. Meanwhile, the city expanded and encroached on the site until it was reduced to a park in a suburb, but a park with a unique history.

[Sebbenth]

Babiy Yar has never been a Jew-exclusive Holocaust site. It was the place where Germans executed everyone they saw fit, guerrilla fighters included.

While the decision to build up the site is regrettable, so are the attempts to turn it into some sort of Jews-only event.

[Dara bhur gCara]

Originally Posted by Sebbenth

Babiy Yar has never been a Jew-exclusive Holocaust site. It was the place where Germans executed everyone they saw fit, guerrilla fighters included.

Neither of the two articles I've posted argue that it was a Jew-exclusive site, and indeed, they both specify that non-Jews were murdered there as well. I'm surprised that you didn't notice that when you read both the articles, which, of course, I'm sure you did, because commenting on an OP without reading it is just stupid, isn't it?

While the decision to build up the site is regrettable, so are the attempts to turn it into some sort of Jews-only event.

What attempts are these to which you are referring?

[jw]

Sadly, Ukrainian politics are a morass of factions and there is a hard core of rightwing nationalists who reject any suggestion of collaboration. They prefer to commemorate the suffering of Ukrainians at the hands of Stalin and his henchmen during the genocidal famine of the early 1930s. Some are keen to remind the public that Jews were prominent in the Soviet apparatus that inflicted this misery. Antisemitism remains at a high level throughout the country and almost every month brings news that Jewish cemeteries or holocaust memorials have been vandalised.

So the decision to give the comfort of international soccer fans priority over the uncomfortable memory of war and genocide is not wholly surprising.

I would hope that this highlighting will result in this project not been built at this place, which should be made into a memorial site, ignoring the local political infighting.