Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze took part at roundtable and opening of exhibition "Babyn Yar: brink of humanity" at European Parliament
08 November 2019 15:55
On 5 November 2019, Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Integration of Ukraine to the EU Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze took part at the roundtable and opening of the exhibition "Babyn Yar: brink of humanity" in the European Parliament.
BABYN YAR Holocaust Memorial Center has launched a traveling informational exhibition that commemorates the victims of the Babyn Yar massacre in Ukraine during September 1941, one of the largest mass-killings of Jewish people by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. The exhibition consists of special visual materials that provide an overview of the massacre, which international scholars estimate led to the murder of over 100,000 Jewish people, with nearly 34,000 shot over two days alone (September 29th – 30th 1941). There were also non-Jewish victims of the massacre, including Roma people, psychiatric patients, political prisoners, and others.
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In September 1941, for the very first time in history, a metropolitan city in Europe lost virtually all of its Jewish inhabitants to premeditated murder. On the edge of Kyiv, in and near the ravine called Babyn Yar, more Jews were slaughtered in two days than in any other single German massacre.
On Sunday, September 28, a poster ordered every Jewish resident of Kyiv and the surrounding area to appear at a certain intersection the following day, and warned that disobedience carried the death penalty. No purpose was stated, but the occupiers spread a rumor that the Jews would be resettled.
All day on September 29, Jewish men, women, and children, along with non-Jewish spouses and other close friends and relatives, streamed toward the designated street corner, where they were told to keep on going. Upon reaching the cemeteries on the edge of town, they were divided into small groups, who, one by one, entered a vicious gauntlet of Germans bearing sub-machine guns who herded them into a cordoned off area.
The Jews were sent into the ravine and were shot. When darkness fell, those Jews who had not yet been shot were pressed into garages, only to be shot the next day. According to Einsatzgruppen Report Number 106, dated October 7, 1941, 33,771 Jews were killed on September 29-30, 1941 at Babyn Yar.
