Memorial for Babi Yar victims inaugurated in Ukraine

By YURAS KARMANAU
Associated Press

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The presidents of Ukraine, Israel and Germany have inaugurated a memorial for the victims of the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine eight decades after one of the most infamous Nazi mass slaughters of the Holocaust. Nearly 34,000 Jews were killed within 48 hours in the Babi Yar ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv when the city was under Nazi occupation in 1941. SS troops carried out the massacre with local collaborators. The presidents of Ukraine, Israel and Germany attended Wednesday’s ceremony to remember the victims and unveiled a new memorial center, which is still under construction. Natan Sharansky of the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial center says that “we are going to give the real faces to the Holocaust.”