Babi Yar is a giant, giant thing. It’s, you know… the Holocaust was essentially two parts: it was the death camps that’s represented by Auschwitz, and it’s the Holocaust by bullets which is just—it was just so often ignored, which is just taking Jews out in pits and shooting them, invariably with the help of local collaborators, and Babi Yar was when thirty‐three thousand Jews were killed in two days. In two days. Okay.
And, you know, there’s—Ukraine is filled with them. I mean, you know, my city Kharkiv has Drobytsky Yar, you know, fifteen‐thousand Jews in two days. It’s, it’s…it’s just, that’s how it is, and… but Babi Yar [is] the Auschwitz of the Holocaust by bullets. And it’s this giant, sprawling ravine—again, thirty‐three thousand bodies, you have to point [out], you know—um… and it has been the target of so much attempts at perversion from various sides.
In 2016, I believe, 2016 and 2017, um…during commemorations of Babi Yar, the Ukrainian government did this despicable thing, which is they put up a temporary display with the Ukrainian nationalists who assisted the [Wehrmacht] in killing the Jews. These people who ran newspapers with the most vile—that egged on Ukrainians to help with this [populicide]. […] It wasn’t enough to kill thirty‐three thousand people in two days. They, afterwards, they were running these […] newspapers saying, ‘Beware! There still may be Jews hiding in the city! Be vigilant for any survivors, lest there any who weren’t killed!’ Okay.
And these people—I mean, it just makes my blood boil—these people, you know, then listed them as victims, because eventually the [Axis] got tired of them and executed them too, these nationalists. And some people say [that] they were killed in Babi Yar, some people—there’s a lot of evidence that they weren’t actually killed in Babi Yar. But regardless of wherever they were killed, it would be like […] putting a memorial to the 9/11 hijackers at Ground Zero, ’cause technically they were killed there too. You know.
And the pain of it, and Jewish organizations stood there and they commemorated Babi Yar with this obscene, this obscene mockery, this perversion of a commemoration, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because Babi Yar does not have an actual museum complex, a comprehensive introduction: What is Babi Yar, what happened there, who killed who[m], who were the victims, who were the perpetrators.
Babi Yar was an important but overshadowed event that demonstrated how militant anticommunists could massacre Jews without the need for camps. There is a monument to it in Ukraine, but the neofascists chose to focus on the few Ukrainian fascists that the Wehrmacht killed instead.