Holocaust History: The Ghost of Babi-Yar

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 Nolan Peterson recently visited the site. <<<

In some parts the trees grew at impossible angles, their roots holding the mud slope together. At the top of the ravine, at the sharp lip of it, the wind blew through the leaves that rustled against the silence that you didn’t notice until it was broken by something as quiet as rustling leaves.

An old road ended at the edge of the ravine. That road was overgrown and closed to traffic and now just a path through a park. Young mothers pushed strollers, and young men played fetch with their dogs. Students hurriedly walked past with headphones in their ears; old men in tweed jackets and old women with covered heads shuffled along.

This old road crossed through a forest of tall trees that swayed in the spring wind until it joined a noisy, larger road full of cars and taxis and buses. This road rolled up and down hills and past stores and restaurants and coffee shops into the heart of Kyiv, where, on Sept. 26, 1941, occupying Nazi soldiers posted this order:

All Yids of the city of Kiev and its vicinity must appear on Monday, Sept. 29, by 8 o’clock in the morning at the corner of Mel’nikova and Doktorivska streets (near the cemetery). Bring documents, money, and valuables, and also warm clothing, linen, etc. Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilians who enter the dwellings left by Yids and appropriate the things in them will be shot.

Three days later, on Sept. 29, 1941, more than 33,000 Jews packed as much as they could carry and left their homes in Kyiv forever. They brought suitcases full of clothes, jewelry, art, and memories. Some children carried a stuffed animal in one hand and held a parent’s hand with the other as they spilled into Kyiv’s cobblestone streets for the two-mile walk from the city center to the Babi Yar ravine.

‘Endless Row’

The SS troops, waiting at the corner of Mel’nikova and Doktorivska streets,were surprised; they expected only 5,000 to 6,000 Jews to show up. The troops, part of the combat arm of the Nazis’ most fanatical organization, wondered if they had enough bullets for what they had been ordered to do.

Some Jews arrived early, hoping for a better seat on the fictional resettlement trains. People in apartments on Melnyk Street, along which the more than 33,000 Jews marched, described an “endless row” that was “overflowing the entire street and the sidewalks.”

As the procession marched along the road to Babi Yar, most still believed the lie that they were to be resettled. But some within the crowd must have suspected what was about to happen. They were marching to their doom.

Maybe it happened when the SS troops started taking away their luggage, and then their coats, and then their clothes, and then their shoes and their underwear. Maybe they understood when they first heard the machine guns firing, or when they reached the end of the road and were beaten and driven in groups of 10 to the edge of the ravine and looked down at the pile of naked dead and waited for their turn as the bullets went down the line and the bodies dropped sharp and hard in the faster-than-gravity way that death pulls one to the earth.

Maybe during all of this, some finally understood what was happening to them.

But a morning walk is hardly enough time to abandon all hope in the goodness of men and believe in the evil at your back.

By the night of Sept. 30, 1941, the bodies of 33,771 murdered Jews lay at the bottom of the Babi Yar ravine. Soon the bodies of about 100,000 others—ethnic minorities, communists, prisoners of war, gypsies, Ukrainian nationalists, and more Jews—slid down the steep dirt slopes to join them.

The bodies remained there, naked in the earth, until August 1943, when the Nazis decided to conceal their crimes as the Red Army advanced on Kyiv.

Read the Remainder at Daily Signal

Profiles in Courage: Gisella Perl, The “Angel of Auschwitz”

Forced to work for the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, Gisella Perl risked all to save as many lives as she could. This is her incredible, heartbreaking story.

We have previously shared the story of Stanislawa Leszczyńska, a midwife at Auschwitz who delivered almost 3,000 babies while imprisoned in the concentration camp.

But while Stanislawa delivered infants, another Jewish medical professional risked her life to save the lives of other women in Auschwitz: a gynecologist named Dr. Gisella Perl. Under the watchful, evil eye of Dr. Josef Mengele, Perl realized that in order to save the lives of the women in her care, she could not safely deliver babies like Stanislawa. Instead, Perl performed abortions.

Gisella Perl was born in Hungary in 1907, and showed signs of being particularly gifted early in life. At the age of 16, Perl graduated first in her secondary school class, becoming the first woman and the only Jew to have done so.

Her father was hesitant to support her academic aspirations, particularly in medicine, fearing that they would lead her to abandon her faith. She assured him that they would not. Perl later married a surgeon and was working as a gynecologist in Hungary when the Germans invaded in 1944.

That year, the Nazis sent Perl, her husband, son, parents and extended family to Auschwitz. A young daughter was hidden with a non-Jewish family just before Perl’s family was taken from the Hungarian ghetto.

Upon arriving at Auschwitz, the Nazis separated Perl from the rest of her family. Her son would die in a gas chamber, and her husband would be beaten to death shortly before the camp was liberated. Perl was spared, only to become an Auschwitz physician under the notorious Josef Mengele.

Initially, Perl was tasked with encouraging inmates to donate blood for use by the German army. When Dr. Mengele realized that Perl had been trained in gynecology, however, he saw an opportunity to obtain information about which inmates had arrived pregnant.In addition to his experiments on twins, Mengele also performed horrific experiments on pregnant women, including vivisection (experimentation and, in some cases, autopsy-like surgeries performed on living, waking humans).

Mengele commanded Perl that she was to report all pregnancies to him directly. Pregnant women, he said, would be sent to a different camp – one with better care for mother and child. Having already seen the horrors that prisoners faced at the hands of the Nazis, Perl knew better than to believe him. She also knew that she couldn’t tell him about a single pregnancy. How she’d keep them a secret, however, she had yet to figure out.

Tragically, some women who overheard this conversation went to Mengele to tell him they were pregnant of their own volition. They were experimented on and, ultimately, died.

Read the Remainder at All That Is Interesting