Eighty years after the Babi Yar massacre, rare photographs that tell the story of the Soviet-era struggle to commemorate the atrocity have been released for the first time by the National Library of Israel’s Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP).
The photos reveal grisly yet critical early efforts to better understand the legacy of Babi Yar and remember its victims.
On September 29-30, 1941, the Nazis and their collaborators committed one of the Holocaust’s largest massacres, murdering nearly 35,000 Jews in just two days at the Babi Yar (sometimes written “Babyn Yar”) ravine, which was then just outside of Kiev, and which is now located within the modern Ukrainian city. More than 100,000 people total were murdered there in just two years.
Yet for years the memory of Babi Yar was in many ways forgotten – the result of efforts to erase and re-write history, as well as the fact that the role and images of the death camps often overshadowed the centrality that other mass murders, like Babi Yar, played in the story of the Holocaust.
In the 1960s this began to change, with publication of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s famous 1961 poem, “Babi Yar”, as well as Anatoly Kuznetsov’s 1966 book of the same name, and a broader movement led by young local Jews interested in their own heritage and history. The personal archive of one of the leaders of this movement, an engineer named Emmanuel (Amik) Diamant, recently came to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People.
In 1966, on the 25th anniversary of the massacre, an unofficial memorial sign was hung at the Babi Yar site, which on subsequent anniversaries drew thousands of local Jews and would become a central force in the awakening of Soviet Jewry. Grassroots efforts also began around that time to locate the mass graves in the area, something else which was certainly not a priority for the Soviet authorities.
Some of these activities were captured on film by Joseph Schneider, a Holocaust survivor, Red Army veteran, anti-Soviet dissident and Zionist activist whose archive also recently came to the CAHJP. These photos, found in the Emmanuel (Amik) Diamant Archive, have now been released to the public for the first time.
Shortly before the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, the National Library of Israel’s Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People signed an agreement with the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center to share information and resources about Jewish life in Ukraine before the Holocaust, a collaboration which will significantly help scholars better understand the stories of those murdered at Babi Yar.
The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) were established in 1939. They hold the archives of hundreds of Jewish communities, as well as of local, national and international Jewish organizations and the private collections of many outstanding Jewish personalities. The Archives now hold the most extensive collection of documents, pinkassim (registers) and other records of Jewish history from the Middle Ages to the present day.