75th anniversary of the Babyny Yar tragedy as part of the Holocaust in Ukraine

In 2016, the 75th anniversary of the tragic events of Babyny Yar will be celebrated. Similar to the Auschwitz death camp in Oswiecim, Babin Yar in Ukraine became a symbol of the destruction of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust. In just two days on September 29-30, 1941, about 34,000 Jews were shot here by the Nazis. Over the next several years, tens of thousands of Jews, as well as Soviet prisoners of war, activists of the Communist Party, Ukrainian nationalists, Roma (Gypsies) and other enemies of the Nazi occupiers were killed in Babi Yar.

The tragedy of Babyny Yar and other events of the Holocaust, mass murders, devaluation of human life affected the general atmosphere in Ukrainian society, affected many events in the history of Ukraine. The events that took place in Babi Yar became one of the bloodiest examples of an attempt by Nazi criminals to finally solve the Jewish question during the Second World War.

Ukraine became the first state in the post-Soviet space to include issues of the history of the Holocaust in state programs for secondary schools on world history and the history of Ukraine. In the university course on the history of Ukraine, these sad events are also necessarily reminded.

We must remember the tragedy of Babi Yar as a terrible example of intolerance, inhuman cruelty and the consequences of various ideologies of national, racial and social supremacy. In today’s conditions, the memory of the events that took place at the end of September 1941 is a harsh warning to all of us about the possible consequences of war, which reveals the worst aspects of human nature.

D.I. Mozulenko, assistant of the Department of Ukrainian Studies and
of general language training of ZNTU