Babyn Yar was a ravine near Kyiv, Ukraine, and the site of a large massacre. The Nazis murdered about 34,000 Jews there on Sept. 29-30, 1941, during World War II. The name of the site is also spelled Babi Yar.
The German army had captured Kyiv, then part of the Soviet republic of Ukraine, and posted notices ordering the city’s Jews to report for resettlement. The victims, carrying their belongings, marched to Babyn Yar ravine, where Nazi killing squads called Einsatzgruppen shot them to death. The area later served as a camp for a detachment of the German dictator Adolf Hitler’s elite SS troops under the command of Paul von Radomski. By 1943, when the Germans retreated, the ravine had become a mass grave for more than 100,000 people, most of them Jews. The Germans burned the bodies to destroy evidence of the deaths. In 1961, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem called “Babi Yar” attacking prejudice against Jews.
