Ghosts of Babi Yar: A Visit to the Ravine Where Nazis Murdered 150,000

Ghosts of Babi Yar: A Visit to the Ravine Where Nazis Murdered 150,000
A giant menorah marks the spot where Nazis murdered about 50,000 Jews and 100,000 others at the Babi Yar ravine during World War II. Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal)
Nolan Peterson
Updated:

KYIV, Ukraine—Seventy-four years later, I reached up and broke off a small piece of a branch that was long and gray. It was bent in the strange, contorted ways it had blindly grown to look for light here at the cold bottom of the ravine, where the forest canopy above had turned the sunny spring day into dark winter’s night.

The branch connected to an old tree with gray and brown bark that was growing out of the hardened black earth on which I stood. It had been a difficult climb down here to the bottom, where tens of thousands of bodies had fallen all those years ago.

The ravine’s muddy walls were steep and slick and carved by erosion.

Editor’s note: The Ukrainian government on Wednesday pledged $1 million to build a memorial at Babi Yar, a ravine where Nazis murdered about 150,000, including 50,000 Jews, during World War II. Officials plan to complete the memorial by the 75th anniversary of the massacre in September. The Daily Signal’s foreign correspondent Nolan Peterson recently visited the site.

Trees cling to the steep, muddy walls of the Babi Yar ravine. (Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal)
Trees cling to the steep, muddy walls of the Babi Yar ravine. Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal
Nolan Peterson
Nolan Peterson
Author
Nolan Peterson is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an independent defense consultant based in Kyiv and Washington. A former U.S. Air Force Special Operations pilot and veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Peterson has more than nine years of experience reporting from Ukraine's front lines.
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