By Andrew Duffy
Published Date: September 14, 2021
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, reports filed by SS units showed 33,771 Jews were massacred during the two-day period.
More than 100 people gathered at the National Holocaust Monument on Tuesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar Massacre, one of the darkest moments in what’s known as the “Holocaust of bullets.”
“Long before Auschwitz, long before Teblinka and Sobibor, there was Babi Yar,” Jewish Federation of Ottawa president and CEO Andrea Freedman told Tuesday’s gathering.
The Babi Yar massacre took place just outside Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, in late September 1941, months after German forces invaded the Soviet Union.
That massive invasion, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, caught Soviet forces by surprise and the Germans advanced rapidly across a wide front. They encircled Kiev, trapped four Soviet armies and killed or captured more than 600,000 Soviet soldiers.
Mobile death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, followed German forces into Kiev, which was home to about 160,000 Jews before the war. Many had fled in advance of the Nazis, and those who remained were mostly women, children, the elderly and the infirm.
This article was published in the Ottawa Citizen. Read the full story.
