Jews urged to fight invaders

Volodymyr Zelensky, who is himself Jewish, urges Jewish people around the world to speak up: ‘Nazism is born in silence. So, shout about killings of civilians’.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky.

DIMA had his back to the television tower broadcasting to Kyiv when the Russian missiles struck. The blast forced him to the ground. “When I turned,” he recounted, “I saw the flames.”

Five people were killed, including a cameraman, Yevhenii Sakun, who was filming outside. Yesterday morning congealed blood lay in the gutter next to the blackened and smoking headquarters of Inter Atletika, a business that manufactures treadmills, exercise bikes and children’s swings and slides.

It was the proximity to a site of historical significance, however, that provoked particular outrage over Russia’s first big attack on the centre of the Ukrainian capital. The tower looms over Babyn Yar, a ravine that is both the burial site and memorial of the worst single massacre of European Jews by Nazi soldiers during the Holocaust.

President Putin justified his invasion as necessary to remove a “neo-Nazi” regime, although its democratic government is led by a Jew, Volodymyr Zelensky, elected in 2019 with 70 per cent of the vote. “Putin seeks to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country. It is utterly abhorrent,” Natan Sharansky, chairman of the board of the Babyn Yar memorial, said. “It is symbolic that he starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the Babyn Yar, the biggest of Nazi massacres.”

The mass murder of more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews took place in September 1941, soon after the Germans bombed Kyiv and then entered the city. Jews were told to gather near a railway station to be resettled but were forced to undress and stand in the ravine, where they were shot. It was the beginning of a purge that would wipe out almost the entire Jewish population of Kyiv over the course of the war. The site was not memorialised until Ukraine gained independence in 1991. The USSR was apparently unwilling to acknowledge the victims were Jewish, referring to it only as a place where Soviet citizens had been killed.

Last year, to mark eight decades since the massacre, Zelensky unveiled an art installation, the Mirror Field, at the site, where Kyiv’s schoolchildren are taken on trips to learn about the Holocaust. Nikita, 20, is one of those who went when he began secondary school. “It is a special place, very important,” he said. “They called it sacred ground.”

Seven days earlier, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, he and his family moved to the nearby Dorohozhychi metro station to stay safe from the bombs. Hundreds of people have camped there for days, filling the central hall between the railway platforms with their bedding, food and pets. Dima was among them but had gone out to fetch food when the missiles struck.

The airstrikes drew outrage from Holocaust memorial institutions from New York to Jerusalem. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, denounced the “deadly Russian attack”, saying: “Rather than being subjected to blatant violence, sacred sites like Babyn Yar must be protected.” Israel’s government, while denouncing the attack, stopped short of naming Russia.

Israel has come under increasing criticism for failing to condemn Russian aggression or join western allies in sanctions. A day after the strikes Yad Vashem itself was reported to have asked the US ambassador to Israel that Roman Abramovich, the Russian-Israeli owner of Chelsea FC, be spared sanctions. He is the museum’s second biggest private donor after the American tycoon Sheldon Adelson, who died last year, and his widow, Miriam.

The morning after the strikes Zelensky made his first appeal to Jews worldwide to come to Ukraine’s aid. There was no doubt his words were also aimed at Israel: he repeated the appeal in a Hebrew post on Telegram that day.

“Babyn Yar is a special place in Kyiv, a special place in Europe,” he wrote. “A place of prayer, a place of memory of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who were murdered by the Nazis. A place of Kyiv’s ancient cemeteries. Why does such a place become the target of a missile strike? You are killing the Holocaust victims again.

“I call now on all the Jews of the world - do you not see what is happening here? This is why it’s important for millions of Jews around the world not to stay silent in the face of such sights. Because Nazism was born in silence. Cry out against the killing of civilians. Cry out against the killing of Ukrainians!”

Yaakov Bleich, Ukraine’s chief rabbi, called on Russians to oust their president. “The Nazi who should be de-Nazified is one man, and his name is Vladimir Putin,” Bleich said. “He’s killing those people he said he wanted to protect.”

The Babyn Yar memorial said it would be submitting evidence of Russia’s war crimes to the International Criminal Court in the Hague and condemned “the false and outrageous narrative of ‘de-Nazifying’ Ukraine”.

Graphic video of the aftermath of the strike and those killed was circulating online but Nikita said that he would not watch it. “Such sights will only crush us, trample us down,” he said. “Our duty to our country is to stay strong.”

THE TIMES