Israeli flag burned at Babi Yar on Holocaust Remembrance Day
Another example of how anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have merged.
I doubt many people know the name Babi Yar, or what happened there. Unless you read Legal Insurrection.
If I polled 10,000 college students, I’d be surprised if more than a handful ever heard of it.
Babi Yar is a large ravine in Kiev, Ukraine.
[Babi Yar ravine, image via Yad Vashem]
[Babi Yar, Jewish women collected local collaborators, image via Yad Vashem]
[Babi Yar mass grave, image via Yad Vashem]
As the Nazis withdrew from Ukraine, they ordered captured Soviet soldiers to exhume and burn the bodies in an attempt to cover up the crime.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum provides the following description:
Kiev was the capital of the Soviet Ukraine when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Some 160,000 Jews resided in Kiev, comprising about 20 percent of the city’s population.
Approximately 100,000 Jews fled Kiev in advance of the German occupation. German forces entered Kiev on September 19, 1941. Along with the rest of the Ukraine, the city was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, headed by East Prussian Nazi district leader Erich Koch. During the first days of the German occupation, two major explosions, apparently set off by Soviet military engineers, destroyed the German headquarters and part of the city center. The Germans used the sabotage as a pretext to murder the remaining Jews of Kiev. At that time, there were about 60,000 Jews in the city. Most of those who remained were women, children, the elderly, and the sick who had been unable to flee.
On September 29-30, 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries, under guidance of members of Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing unit) C, murdered the Jewish population of Kiev at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of the city. This was one of the largest mass murders at an individual location during World War II. As the victims moved into the ravine, Einsatzgruppe detachments shot them in small groups. According to reports by the Einsatzgruppe to headquarters, 33,771 Jews were massacred in two days. In the months following the massacre, German authorities stationed at Kiev killed thousands more Jews at Babi Yar, as well as non-Jews including Roma (Gypsies), Communists, and Soviet prisoners of war. It is estimated that some 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar.
The Soviet army liberated Kiev on November 6, 1943.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem, which was not officially published in the Soviet Union for over 20 years, is as powerful now as it was then:
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.
The rest of the poem is at the link.
A monument later was built, remembering the site as a general memorial to Soviet dead.
I visited the Babi Yar memorial in January 1979. The monument was typical Soviet style. I took this photo (a better close up not taken by me is here).
![[Babi Yar Memorial 1979, photo by William Jacobson]](https://legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Babi-Yar-Memorial-1979-photo-by-William-Jacobson-e1462664378391.png)
[Babi Yar Memorial 1979, photo by William Jacobson]
President George H.W. Bush visited Babi Yar in August 1991. He remarked, in part:
We come to Babi Yar to remember. We remember violence and valor; we remember prejudice and selflessness. At Babi Yar, in the vast quiet here, something larger than life assails us: the shadows of past evil, the light of past virtue. The wind that shakes the leaves bears a special weight, as if whispering warnings and cautions, telling tales of victims and villains, cowards and heroes.
Babi Yar stands as a monument to many things. It reminds us that history gives our lives meaning and continuity and that any nation that tries to repudiate history, tries to ignore the actors and events that shape it, only repudiates itself.
For many years, the tragedy of Babi Yar went unacknowledged, but no more….
Let me quote the poet Yevtushenko, whose poem about Babi Yar helped restore remembrance of this place and of its history. Here’s what he wrote: On Babi Yar weeds rustle; the tall trees, like judges, loom and threaten. All screams in silence; I take off my cap and feel that I am slowly turning gray. And I, too, have become a soundless cry over the thousands that lie buried here. I am each old man slaughtered, each child shot. None of me will forget.
None of us will ever forget.
That Jewish memorial has been the subject of repeated vandalism over the years, including Swastikas and the burning of tires.
A few days ago, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, an Israeli flag was burned at the Babi Yar Jewish Memorial. The Times of Israel reports:
The mayor of Kiev on Thursday appealed to authorities for help in identifying a group of individuals caught on camera burning an Israeli flag at the city’s Babi Yar Holocaust memorial.
“Video surveillance recorded the group of young vandals burning the flag of the State of Israel near the Menora memorial, at Babi Yar,” Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a statement, according to local media reports.
“This happened on the national Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the Jewish people all over the world remember the 6 million victims of Nazism, who perished during World War II,” he said.
Klitschko called the incident “unacceptable,” and appealed to law enforcement agencies for help in strengthening security measures at the site.
“It is intolerable to brutalize the memory of the victims. Especially at the place that which is globally known as one of the symbols of a terrible crime of fascism, at Babi Yar, where tens of thousands of people of different nationalities, the majority of them Jewish, were killed,” he said.
That an Israeli flag would be burned at Babi Yar comes as no real surprise. As we have documented so many times, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have merged in the real world, even if intellectually there is a difference.
“Triumph of the Return” – On September 4, 2003, in a large ceremony, the Israeli Air Force flew three f-15 jets over the Auschwitz concentration camp in a show of the Jewish people’s continued strength and triumph over past adversities.
[Featured Image: The Atlantic, AP photo]
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Comments
The flame of Israel’s God given light burns brighter than the insolent and callous cowards’ fire that burned her flag at Babi Yar.
i’ve known where Baba Yar is and what happened there for decades.
You don’t have to be Jewish to be horrified by these unspeakable acts. There are no words in the English language to express how repugnant any person could kill innocent men, women and children. What is frightening is that so many (i.e. Open minded liberals) who talk about civil rights and equality in this nation are so deluded that they think that the halocaust was probably figment of someone’s imagination.
Radical islam wants a repeat performance — Never Again!
Stand with Israel
Sometimes when I am reminded of events such as Babi Yar and many more like it, being a member of the human race becomes a burden. My heart aches for the people who had to suffer the indignity that was forced upon them and then had to face certain execution. What part of the human mind allows such things? Standing naked before another tells us that we are the same beings. How do we then commit such horrors against each other? As brutal as nature can be there is a purpose. This savage act has no purpose and has no place in our minds or hearts. God bless Israel and its people.
The experience of these mass field murders, mainly of Jews and suspected resisters, led to the death camps’ establishment. It turned out that even the most fanatical troops experienced unprecedented rates of what we now call PTSD, making them unready to return to duty. The horror of personally carrying out cold-blooded murder affects even the hardest hearts. Human beings are not – or no longer are – wired to commit such wanton acts of cruelty.
The extermination camps were designed to depersonalize the process for the German soldiers. Fewer were directly involved or witnessed the killing before their eyes, so the rate of disabling PTSD was reduced, and confined to those already not deemed fit for the front lines.
– –
Mongol and muslim conquerors had engaged in the mass killing of civilians for centuries, but the sheer cold depth of planning and refining of the Nazis’ program created the need to recognize this new sort of iniquity as a Crime Against Humanity.
No reports of PTSD among the Mongol and Muslim killers.
…which suggests that the Nazi troops were more humane than Muslims and Mongols.
Some of the Nazi troops, not all, because anyone reading about the behaviour of the troops guarding and working in the death camps would realize that they were an animal of a different colour.
Agreed. But then, my intent was to question the wisdom (and moral decency) of those who idolize Muslims and Mongols.
Feelings do not matter, actions do (with the exception of those of the occupied nations who were happy with what the Germans were doing). It is a fact of history that of the four world-religions in the West, Islam as a general rule was the most tolerant (at least to Jews). Not at all times, not in all places, and overall it was no picnic, but the facts are still what they are.
(The four religions are secularism (the most vicious), paganism, Christianity (at least until 1750) and Islam.)
But much of the murdering in the East was by means of killing squads, not camps.
PS – When the Germans marched into Lithuania, it was Lithuanians who rounded up prominent Jews (including Rabbi Elchono Wasserman who was a fervent anti-Communist) and murdered them. In Romania Germans and Romanians worked together in their own separate Holocaust.
I should mention that one of the victims of the great Iasi/Jascy pogrom/mass-murder was a priest who yelled out his opposition. All is well-documented in “The Holocaust in Romania”, a book that is worth reading because it not only gives the big picture, but what happened to individuals, avoiding the problem of “a thousand deaths is a statistic”.
It should also be noted that before the WWII German invasion, the Ukrainian population had already been devastated by the Stalinist Harvest of Shame in the early ’30s, which involved the forced starvation of millions in retaliation for the resistance to collectivization. Ukraine had previously been the major grain-producing region of all Europe, a breadbasket comparable to the American Midwest.
I read the book Babi Yar while attending a US Government high school in West Germany in the late ’60’s. Not sure about now, but the U.S. Military was not particularly sensitive to Germany sensibilities at that time.
Never gave much thought to how the German’s felt about having a high school named after the architect of their destruction–H. H. Arnold–in the middle of their country…
Another case of Ameircan exceptioonalism (and I do view it as positive).