Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration

Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained in the city during the occupation.

After the war, Soviet ideology suppressed commemoration of the Holocaust, instead conceptualizing the universal suffering of the Soviet people during the war. Police dispersed unauthorized commemoration meetings of Jewish activists at Babyn Yar. A monument “for one hundred thousand citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of the war” was erected in Babyn Yar in 1976, but the Holocaust was not mentioned in its inscription.

With the collapse of communism, state anti-Semitism ended. Holocaust commemoration became an important part of national memory politics in independent Ukraine. In the last few decades, over thirty monuments have been built at Babyn Yar, which are dedicated to the memory of Jews, Roma, members of the resistance movement, and other people executed there. However, heated debates continue about the commemoration of the Babyn Yar massacre.

Dr. Victoria Khiterer is a professor of history at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. Khiterer was born and grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Khiterer is a founding member of the Academic Council of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. She is author and editor of eight books and over a hundred articles on Ukrainian, Russian, and Eastern European Jewish history and the Holocaust. Her book, Jewish City or Inferno of Russian Israel? A History of the Jews in Kiev before February 1917, received the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles Award in 2017.