Babi Yar in poetry

Poems about Babi Yar commemorate the massacres committed by the Nazi Einsatzgruppe during World War II at Babi Yar, in a ravine located within the present-day Ukrainian capital of Kiev. In just one of these atrocities – taking place over September 29–30, 1941 – Jewish men, women and children numbering 33,771 were killed in a single Einsatzgruppe operation.

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The German army crossed the 1939 former Polish-Soviet border soon thereafter and arrived in Kiev on September 19, 1941. Ten days later, following an explosion at the German army headquarters, Jews were rounded up, marched out of town, made to strip naked and massacred; they were stacked up, layer upon layer, at Babi Yar (literally, a "grandmother's ravine.")

For decades after World War II, Soviet authorities were unwilling to acknowledge that the mass murder of Jews at Babi Yar was part of the Holocaust. The victims were generalized as Soviet; mention of their Jewish identity was impermissible, even though their deaths were every bit as much a consequence of the Nazi's genocidal Final Solution as the death camps of occupied Poland (Ehrenburg, Pravda 1944). There was, too, a virtual ban on mentioning the participation of the local police, or the role of the auxiliary battalions sent to Kiev by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) in rounding up, guarding and murdering their Jewish countrymen. In order to make the connection the Soviets worked so hard to suppress, Holocaust scholars have come to call events such as the massacres at Babi Yar "the Holocaust by bullet."

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