Holocaust memorial as a target?
Zelenskyy: Russia wants to ‘wipe out’ Ukraine
03/02/2022 10:36 am
The Babyn Yar Gorge resulted in the deaths of more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews during World War II. Today the memorial is almost the target of a Russian attack. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy accuses Russia of wanting to erase Ukrainian history.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of wanting to “wipe out” Ukraine after an airstrike near a Holocaust memorial in Kyiv. The shelling shows that “for many people in Russia, our Kyiv is completely foreign,” said the head of state in a video message. “They know nothing about our capital. About our history. But they have orders to erase our history. Erase our country. Erase us all.”
Selenskyj, who is Jewish himself, called on Jews around the world to raise their voices. “Don’t you see what is happening here? It is therefore very important that millions of Jews around the world do not remain silent now,” he said. “Nazism is born in silence.”
“To the world, what’s the use of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years if the world remains silent when a bomb falls on the Babyn Yar site?” Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter. “Again these barbarians murder the victims of the Holocaust!”
The Russian army fired on a television tower in Kyiv on Tuesday, killing five people. The tower stands near the Babyn Yar Gorge and the memorial to a massacre of Jewish Ukrainians committed there by the Wehrmacht during World War II.
According to information from the museum management, a building in the immediate vicinity of the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial was damaged. The affected building was built as a sports center during Soviet times and should now become part of the memorial, said Nathan Sharansky, head of the memorial’s supervisory board. It has now been damaged by a fire, but the exact extent is still unclear. Sharansky is not there himself.
In the Babyn Jar gorge, SS commandos shot more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews on September 29 and 30, 1941. Up to 100,000 people were killed in the area by 1943 – Jews, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.