Erased From History

"One day I was ordered to drive my truck out of town. I had a Ukrainian with me. It was about 10 a.m. On our way, we passed Jews marching in columns in the same direction, we were going. They were carrying their belongings. There were whole families. The farther we drove away from the town, the more people we saw in the columns. There were piles of clothes in a wide open field. My job was to fetch them."  

"I stopped the engine nearby, and the Ukrainians standing around started loading the car with this stuff. From where I was, I saw other Ukrainians meeting the Jews who arrived, men, women and children, and directing them to the place where, one after another, they were supposed to remove their belongings, coats, shoes, outer garments and even their underwear."

"They were supposed to put all their belongings together in a pile. Everything happened very quickly, the Ukrainians hurried those who hesitated by kicking and pushing them. I think it took less than a minute from the moment a person took off his coat before he was standing completely naked."

"No distinction was made between men, women and children. The Jews who were arriving could have turned back when they saw those who had come earlier taking off their clothes. Even today I cannot understand why they didn’t run."

Columns of Jews march past a corpse in Kiev

"Naked Jews were led to a ravine about 150 metres long, 30 metres wide and 15 metres deep. The Jews went down into the ravine through two or three narrow paths. When they got closer to the edge of the ravine, members of the Schutzpolizei (Germans) grabbed them and made them lie down over the corpses of the Jews who had already been shot."

"It took no time. The corpses were carefully laid down in rows. As soon as a Jew lay down, a Schutzpolizist came along with a sub-machine gun and shot him in the back of the head.The Jews who descended into the ravine were so frightened by this terrible scene that they completely lost their will. You could even see some of them lying down in the row on their own and waiting for the shot to come."

"Only two members of the Schutzpolizei did the shooting. One of them was working at one of the ravine, the other started at the other end. I saw them standing on the bodies and shooting one person after another."

"Walking over the corpses toward a new victim who had already laid down, the machine gunner shot him on the spot. It was an extermination machine that made no distinction between men, women and children.Children were kept with their mothers and shot with them. I did not watch for long. When I approached the edge, I was so frightened of what I that I could not look at it for a long time."

German Einsatzgruppen & Police force groups of Jews to hand over their possessions and undress before being shot in the ravine at Babi Yar

"I saw dead bodies at the bottom laid across in three rows, each of which was approximately 60 metres long. I could not see how many layers were there. It was beyond my comprehension to see bodies twitching in convulsions and covered with blood, so I could not make sense of the details.Apart from the two machine gunners, there were two other members of the Schutzpolizei standing near each passage into the ravine."

"They made each victim lie down on the corpses, so that the machine gunner could shoot while he walked by. When victims descended into the ravine and saw this terrible scene at the last moment, they let out a cry of terror. But they were grabbed by the waiting Schutzpolizei right away and hurled down onto the others."

"Those who followed them could not see the terrible scene because it was obstructed by the edge of the ravine. While some people were getting undressed and most of the others were waiting their turn, there was a lot of noise. The Ukrainians paid no attention to the noise and just kept forcing people through the passages into the ravine."

"You could not see the ravine from the site where people were taking off their clothes, because it was situated about 150 metres away from the first pile of clothes. Besides, a strong wind was blowing and it was very cold. You couldn’t hear the shooting in the ravine."

Jews at Babi Yar waiting to be murdered

"So I concluded that the Jews had no idea what was actually happening. Even today I wonder why the Jews did nothing to challenge what was going on. Masses of people were coming from town and they did not seem to suspect anything."

"They thought they were just being relocated."

Fritz Hoefer  - Eyewitness to Mass Murder

Testimony at the Einsatzgruppen war crimes trial: Babi Yar,
Witness and Survivor accounts of the Mass Murder in Kiev

"We do one by one by one."
"If we give one more victim a grave, we've accomplished something."
Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi, Poland

"What we know about the murders in concentration camps is only half the knowledge of what truly took place in the Holocaust."
"Researchers have only scratched the surface in our understanding of the perhaps millions of people who lie beneath fields and ravines whom we will never know about."
"They are undocumented and erased from history."
Avi Benlolo, president, CEO, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, Toronto

"For 70 years, the local communities have kept the memory about the fate that had befallen their Jewish neighbours" reads part of a study written by Agnieszka Nieradko, Sebastian Rozycki, Jerzy Karezewski and Aleksander Schwarz, all involved as researchers with the Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries, assigned to scour the Polish countryside in a search for forgotten mass graves from the era of World War Two's Holocaust years.

"I saw it with my own eyes. Germans shot Jews on the way to the train station and then ordered Poles to take the bodies to the local Jewish cemetery and bury them in previously prepared pits", recounted one witness in 1976. "We are living next to the graves. They are everywhere", commented Agnieszka Nieradko. But though they are everywhere, their locations have not yet been fully explored and it is her task and that of her fellow researchers to interview possible witnesses, to scour the countryside around the small towns and villages where the mass murders took place, to position the gravesites and to memorialize them.

Witnesses, needless to say, are hard to come by, since a lifetime has passed since the mass atrocities took place. Hearsay, though, has a habit of trickling down in a close-spaced population where people know everything that happens. And generally speaking people would be unwilling to speak of everything that they know. The usefulness to the German authorities, for example, of the Polish locals. What happened in Ukraine at Babi Yar was repeated elsewhere, all over Europe. In some countries in particular, like Poland and Ukraine, the Nazis knew there would be no opposition to their grand plan of genocidal extermination.

The townspeople who watched from near or afar, aiding or preferring not to, as their neighbours were systematically rounded up, ordered to obey instructions and surrender their lives; the elderly grandparents, the parents, the children, not precisely acquiescing, but befuddled, confused, in a daze of apprehension and concern but incapable of realizing fully that the life they were familiar with was set to expire suddenly and finally, leaving a legacy to their fellow townspeople not of bereavement but of acquisition of all that they had owned, enriching their neighbours by their absence.

The few survivors who managed to return to their villages soon discovered the extent of the hostility when attempting to reclaim their homes.

There is an urgency at this juncture for the researchers with the Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries to identify as many mass graves as they can manage before impending and inevitable land development begins its work transforming woodland, farmland and small town forests into urban centres. Of the countless towns and villages, Nieradko knows, each in all likelihood has the presence of at least one mass grave, awaiting the researchers' placement and memorialization with a small plaque of acknowledgement that there lies the remnants of each village's contingent of Jews.

Simply finding where the gravesites are located is the primary purpose since Jewish law forbids that graves be disturbed. Ground-penetrating radar is used to affirm the presence of mass graves where on occasion an elderly person leads the researchers, excavating her memory for its location. The area is then marked, tracing the mass grave's edges with stones, and a plaque and headstone placed beside it, as they did in the forest of the village outside Lublin.

An estimated tens of thousands of unmarked Holocaust graves are sprinkled throughout Poland and eastern Europe, beside roads, in forests, marshes or fields. Where millions of Jews are known to have been shot en masse by the Nazi mobile killing units helped by their local collaborators, the remnants of countless lives buried in unmarked mass graves all through eastern Europe's countryside. Reverend Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest, one of the most dedicated searchers for unmarked Jewish graves has named the phenomenon the Holocaust by Bullets, where people were shot outside their homes, on village outskirts, executed on marches, burned in barns, discovered in hideouts, killed by grenades.

Aerial photographs help lead the researchers to soil disturbances; oblong shapes, many metres wide and long; L-shapes among them, with radar indicating the shapes -- identify the mass graves whose interiors metres below the ground hold evidence of man's inhumanity to man.

Jews march towards the ravine at Babi Yar