Ukraine: the memorial project of the Nazi massacre of Babyn Yar at the center of a controversy

Ukrainian President at a ceremony to commemorate the Babyn Yar massacre, in Kiev, September 29, 2021. via REUTERS - HANDOUT

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Two of the only three Jewish heads of state in the world, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Israeli counterpart, Isaac Herzog, accompanied by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, commemorate in Kiev this Wednesday the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy during of which 33,000 Jews were gunned down by the Nazis in a suburb of Kiev in 1941. But controversy is brewing around the construction of a memorial at the site of the massacre.

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With our correspondent in Kiev,

Stéphane Siohan

Babyn Yar

is a ravine in which more than 100,000 people were killed and buried from 1941 to 1943. The site was turned into a park in Soviet times, but it is under construction to create a large museum of the Shoah by bullet, destined to become after Berlin and Warsaw the third major Shoah museum in Europe. The artistic direction has been entrusted to Ilya Khrzhanovsky, an iconoclastic Russian filmmaker, author of the DAU project, who wishes to break the codes of the Holocaust narrative. "

When the visitor is no longer just an observer, but through actions, he can follow a certain path, he must react to what he is confronted with, he can participate in it or not participate in it.

But I see the possibility of reaching certain depths, of immersing oneself in the depth of Babyn Yar so that the territory of the drama becomes a real journey,

 ”he explains.

Proximity to the Kremlin

But the project is going badly with civil society and Ukrainian intellectuals. He is accused of wanting to make Babyn Yar an amusement park in which visitors would be forced to put themselves in the shoes of victims or executioners. By the way, the memorial is funded by a group of oligarchs some of whom are close to the Kremlin, and Leonid Finberg, translator of Hannah Arendt's books into Ukrainian, a prominent member of Kiev's Jewish community, does not like it at all. "

This is a Soviet and Russian project, in opposition to the liberal and democratic project carried by the Ukrainians," he

insists. 

Why is Putin and his team spending 120 million dollars to erect a memorial in Ukraine?

When it is not under Ukrainian state control, then it will be easy to say that Ukraine is the country of the Holocaust, while Ukraine was not the center of the Holocaust.

 " 

The memorial project is supported by President Volodymyr Zelensky, but in the current context between Ukraine and Russia, it is not expected to rise from the ground for several years.

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  • Ukraine

  • Volodymyr Zelensky

  • Holocaust