The Tragedy of Babi Yar in the Ukraine
MA sent me the link to this article about preparations to honour the holocaust victims in Babi Yar in the Ukraine, where 34,000 Jews were massacred in two days.
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The massacres at Babi Yar were on a scale that defies comprehension.Reading this article reminded me of the very powerful novel, The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, which I read shortly after it was published back in 1981. The first half of it is pretty weird for my tastes, but the last half is an immensely captivating story about the events at Babi Yar.
Nearly 34,000 Jews, many of them elderly, women and children, were forced to gather at Babi Yar by German troops just days after the Nazi invasion. They were shot along the ravine's edge on September 29 and 30, 1941....
The ravine continued to be used for executions and up to 60,000 more people - Jews, resistance fighters and Soviet prisoners of war - were killed there until 1943.
Before retreating from the advancing Red Army in 1943, Nazi troops exhumed and burned the corpses at Babi Yar in a last-ditch bid to hide the atrocities committed there.
Category: Anti-Semitism, Books, etc. Posted on
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 at 10:39am
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