The beginning of the German-Soviet war on June 22, 1941, marked a radical turn in the Nazi anti-Jewish policy and the shift to mass murder. The key element of the Holocaust in Ukraine was that the Nazis and their satellites divided its territory into several occupation zones. Each zone had its administration regime and specific approach to killing Jews. On the map on the right, you can see the boundaries of these zones: from the largest - the Reich Commissariat “Ukraine” (which included the then Dnipropetrovsk) to the territory of Transcarpathia (now Zakarpattia region), which in March 1939 was occupied and incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary.

Babyn Yar (located within Kyiv) is separately marked on the map. It’s a tragic symbol of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Europe. On September 29-30, 1941, thirty-three thousand seven hundred and seventy-one people were murdered there by Einsatzgruppe C’s special Nazi police department units.

Babyn Yar was not the first place where mass shootings took place. As early as the end of August 1941, almost twenty-three thousand Jews were shot in Kamianets-Podilskyi. However, in Babyn Yar, not only adult Jewish men but also women and children fell victims to the Nazi ideology of extermination. In addition, Soviet prisoners of war, mentally ill people, anti-Nazi underground movements members, Roma, Ukrainian nationalists, and priests were killed there.

Looking to the left, you can see the ravine contour. Its sandy cliffs resemble the Babyn Yar landform. Nazis used ravines and ditches on the outskirts of cities and towns to carry out massacres. The path to the ravine is symbolically short and straight as too little time passed from the Nazis’ arrival to the beginning of systematic and total terror against the Jews.

Walking to the ravine, to your right on a stand, where until recently theatrical and sports posters were hanging, one could now read occupation authorities orders defining the so-called “new order” routine and look at the photographs of the occupied cities. On the opposite side of the road, there are excerpts from the diaries and letters of Ukrainian Jews who became victims of the Nazi genocide long before the Auschwitz gas chambers and other death camps began their infernal work.