My family comes from the area where Russia/Ukraine/Belarus intersect. They were exterminated. I am feeling a heartache, relived for my people. This time I can watch, at least, and feel and care and hope. So please understand my need to share through writing and photographs—even painting—the emotions I am watching and internalizing. “Never again, never again, we must never forget,” was ingrained in us in synagogue Sunday school. I thought the adults were overreacting. Impossible, I thought. Now we know. It only takes one person.
Remember that in 2024.
2017: Menorah at Drobytsky Yar. 2022: Menorah at Drobytsky Yar
(Outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine) (after missile attack)
Growing up, we learned about Babi Yar* at an early age.
The word “yar” is Turkic in origin and means “gully” or “ravine”.
BUT Did you know ‘Yar’ also translates to ‘love?’
Drobitsky Yar is the 2nd Holocaust memorial to be bombed during this invasion. Russian forces have shelled and damaged the giant black metal Menorah there, on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine. The Russian forces also dropped bombs on the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial on March 1. An estimated 100,000 to 150,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar, in 1941, including approximately 33,000 Jews.
“The Nazis have returned, exactly 80 years later,” said the Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense
Drobitsky Yar is where SS officers shot approximately 15,000 Jews in December 1941, during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, according to the World Jewish Congress. Children were thrown into pits alive, where they would quickly freeze to death, to save bullets.
In 2002, a Holocaust memorial featuring the giant black menorah was built. Earlier this month, Russian artillery shelling damaged the menorah,
“History repeating,” Zelenskyy, the grandson of Holocaust survivors says.
Early on, Russia’s unprovoked attack of Ukraine featured rhetoric relating to the Nazis. Putin tried to justify his senseless invasion by claiming to “de-Nazify” the country. He baselessly accused Ukraine of genocide. Meanwhile, Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, has compared the Russian military assault of his country to the Holocaust: “Russia is attempting to carry out a “final solution.”
[And today as I write, in the midst of this horror, Trump is asking Putin for dirt on Hunter Biden. Sick, sick man.]
*Babi Yar or Babyn Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out in September, 1941, by Nazi Germany. The decision to murder all the Jews in Kyiv was made by the military governor, the police commander, and the SS senior group leader, along with the aid of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, backed by the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany. The massacre was the largest mass-murder under the Nazi regime and its Ukrainian collaborators during the campaign against the Soviet Union. It has been called “the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust” to that particular date, surpassed by the Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews one month later, committed by German and Romanian troops, and by Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival) of up to 43,000 victims in November, 1943, in occupied Poland.
Every now and then I used to pipe dream about traveling back to “find my roots,” my sense of place, but it never felt safe, not that it had ever come close to reality anyway. It is sad to know it will never happen. I will be gone from this world before it is ever a possibility.
great-grandfather
Russia, 1923.
Let’s hope.
Slava Ukraini.
link to Babi Yar Symphony by Dimitri Dimitrievich Shostakovich: https://cso.org/experience/audio/4118/shostakovich-13-babi-yar
