Long before Auschwitz, long before Treblinka and Sobibor, there was Babi Yar—the sprawling ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where the Nazis, with support from the locals, murdered 33,771 Jews in a two-day killing spree on September 29 and 30, 1941.

BABI YAR, Ukraine – No Ukrainian has the right to forget the Babi Yar massacre, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Thursday night at the state ceremony to mark 75 years since the Babi Yar slaughter.

Vasily Mikhailovsky was four years old when, in late September 1941, flyers appeared around German-occupied Kyiv, instructing "all Yids" to assemble at an appointed location on the edge of the city. He remembers the day well. "It was wonderful weather," Vasily, who is one of three Babyn Yar survivors in Kyiv still living, told DW. "Sunny. A truly golden autumn day."

BABI YAR, Ukraine — Seventy-five years after Nazi forces and their local Ukrainian collaborators executed nearly 34,000 Jews in a Kiev ravine, Ukraine has begun to open up about its Holocaust-era history and reckon with the role it played in perpetrating one of the worst Nazi massacres of World War II.

"We feel deeply honored that a German orchestra may participate in such a memorial concert," said Daniel Kühnel, director of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra performs at the National Opera in Kyiv on Thursday (29.09.2016). The concert serves as the climax and conclusion of a week of commemorative events in the Ukrainian capital.

Photo:  Andrew Waller

Though the Babi Yar 75th anniversary commemoration events in Kiev are slated to continue for at least another four days and the German government’s own program of activities has yet to begin, the final and signature events of the weeklong commemoration took place on Thursday.

“No gravestone stands on Babyn Yar,” wrote the Soviet poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko in 1961. He was condemning the Soviet regime’s failure to acknowledge the Babyn Yar tragedy twenty-five years after World War II had ended.

On September 29, 1941, the Nazis carried out a massacre by bullets against almost 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children at the Babi Yar ravine outside of Kiev. Under the shadow of Ukraine’s continued conflict with Russia, the government of President Petro Poroshenko has embarked on the most comprehensive and committed memorializing of the events in the history of the Ukrainian state.

KIEV—The soil of Babi Yar is the color of pulverized ashes, its sooty gray and green landscape interrupted by the occasional trash heap. The sprawling park, just a few metro stops away from Kiev’s city center, was once dubbed “Kiev’s Switzerland” for its seemingly placid, plunging landscape.

KIEV – “If you force Jewish history out of Ukrainian history, then there is no Ukrainian history that makes any sense,” prominent Holocaust scholar Prof. Timothy Snyder said on Monday at a week-long conference in Kiev dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre.