Over two days in 1941, Nazi killing squads executed more than 33,000 people at Babyn Yar in Ukraine, in one of the worst mass murders of Jews during the Holocaust of World War II
Ukraine had been part of the area in 18th-century Russia where Jews were permitted to live, Shapiro said. They thus became early victims of the Nazi invasion.Special Nazi killing squads, called Einsatzgruppen, followed the German army, murdering people in its wake. “In every town and village in Ukraine, somewhere there is a shooting site,” Shapiro said.
At Babyn Yar, on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, German troops and Ukrainian police rounded up unsuspecting local Jews and herded them toward the ravine. They were instructed to leave their belongings sorted into piles, and then told to strip.“Once undressed, the Jews were led into a ravine which was about 150 meters long, 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep,” the driver, identified only as Hofer, recounted in historian Michael Berenbaum’s 1997 book “Witness to the Holocaust.
“It went on in this way uninterruptedly, with no distinction being made between men, women and children. The children were kept with their mothers and shot with them,” he said.The gunfire could not be heard outside the ravine. “That is why I think the Jews did not realize in time what lay ahead of them,” Hofer recounted.
“An old woman with snow-white hair was holding the 1-year old child in her arms and singing to it,” he said.