Images from Ukraine: Putin’s attack on Babyn Yar is a painful reminder of the broken vow of “Never Again”

Reports from Ukraine: This feature is part of an original Milwaukee Independent editorial series that recorded news from cities across Ukraine, including Milwaukee's sister city of Irpin, in May 2022. It was the first and, at that time, only news organization in Wisconsin that traveled to the country since it was invaded. The purpose of this journalism project was to document personal stories and events that detailed or showed the conditions of the war at that time, and their connections to Milwaukee. mkeind.com/reportsfromukraine

At the beginning of Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was struck by Russian missiles that failed to destroy the nearby Kyiv TV Tower. Five civilians visiting the park were killed, and the TV tower has remained unscathed since. The act was a bloody reminder of Russia’s long history of terror and cruelty against Ukrainian Jews.

The Memorial for Babi Yar victims was inaugurated in Kyiv on October 6, 2021. It was designed to honor the dead of the Babi Yar massacre, considered one of the most horrific mass slaughters by Nazi forces.

Within 48 hours, between September 29 and 30 of 1941, nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children were killed at the ravine in the Ukrainian capital. Nazi troops would go on to kill between 70,000 and 100,000 people at Babyn Yar between 1941 and 1943, including almost the entire Jewish population of Kyiv.

For the first time since World War II a memorial and research center was built on the site of the killing fields. The “Holocaust of bullets” remained shrouded in silence for decades, because of Ukraine’s domination by the former Soviet Union.

The Soviets tried several times to physically destroy the graves and delete the history of the site, in an effort to suppress any mention of the atrocities committed against Jews.

In the aftermath of the missile attack in March, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded by denouncing the Russian strike.

“This is beyond humanity. Such a missile strike means that for many Russians our Kyiv is absolute foreign. They know nothing about our capital, about our history. They have orders to erase our history, our country, and all of us.”

Previously to the installation of the memorial site, Zelensky had never called attention to his Jewish identity, or the fact that some of his relatives were murdered at Babi Yar.

“What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar? At least 5 killed. History repeating…”

That Babyn Yar could be damaged or destroyed by an aggressive military attack by Russia went against everything the memorial stood for. But the significance of the attack goes deeper. It was painfully symbolic that the Russian dictator started attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the biggest Nazi massacre in Ukraine.

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