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In a wooded park west of Kyiv, Ukraine, near the ravine known as Bavian Yar, Oleh Shovenko leads me to a 20-foot-tall metal structure overlooking a field clogged by brush. This half-finished art installation is called “kurgan,” a word for a type of prehistoric burial mound discovered in Ukraine and Russia. Once completed, Shovenko tells me, visitors will enter the roughly 260-foot-long burial mound through one of two portals. Then, they’ll descend ten feet into a synthetic canyon lit by a skylight.
Here a series of miniature dioramas, built to scale and making use of plasma screens and virtual reality displays, will bring to life an unfathomable horror: the murder of 33,771 men, women and children—a huge portion of Kyiv’s remaining Jewish population—at the ravine on September 29 and 30, 1941. The atrocity, carried out by an SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing unit, Nazi police and several dozen Ukrainian collaborators, was by many accounts the single deadliest mass killing of Jews during the Holocaust. (As many as 70,000 more people, including other Jews, Soviet POWs and Roma civilians, are believed to have been murdered in the ravine in the two years that followed.) Remarkably, until now, the massacre of Kyiv’s Jews has never been properly memorialized.
To recreate the ravine as it was 80 years ago, artists, architects and historians studied the geological and aerial surveys carried out before the war by the tsarist and then Soviet authorities, as well as all available old maps, some from the 19th century. . The photographs showed the original network of ravines as well as five cemeteries, plus a Jewish one, that existed on the site before the Nazi invasion. The studies and design team also had access to photographs taken immediately after the bloodbath by a Nazi photographer. The evolving kurgan plan now calls for employing 3D printers to make thousands of individualized two-inch-tall figures of the sufferers and their Nazi tormentors to recreate scenes from the bloodbath and its aftermath. Visitors will experience the rounding up of Jews in the suburbs of Kiev, their march to the execution ground, the mass shootings in the ravine, and the Nazis’ desperate attempt two years later to cover up their crimes as the Red Army advanced on Kiev. “Finishing this is our priority,” Shovenko told me. “It is vital to give it a home so that other people can spend time here and delight in the story from start to finish. ” »
Shovenko is the deputy artistic director of the Bavian Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, a $100 million complex that has been under construction for years and aims to combine meticulous studies and artistic innovation to create the world’s grandest World War II memorial. Originally, the center was conceived as a single giant museum, but starting in 2020, those plans evolved into a much more ambitious project, adding art facilities and at least four separate museums. One of them, the Bavian Yar Victims Museum, would recreate Ukraine’s vanished Jewish culture using photographs and mundane objects from life: furniture, chandeliers, antique radios, and other memorabilia collected through staff. Another, the Museum of Oblivion, would document the Soviet Union’s efforts to cover up the bloodbath after World War II and Jewish acts of resistance opposed to the Soviet Union. Trails through the 370-acre former extermination site would connect the facility.
In October 2021, around the 80th anniversary of the massacre, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was joined by Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to dedicate the partially built complex. The Ukrainian government expected that the site would soon take its place alongside other revered Holocaust memorials—Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—as a hallowed place for remembrance and contemplation. And as a symbol of the belated recognition of the atrocity, it was also regarded as a means of helping to cement Ukraine’s progressive new role in Europe.
Then, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Troops occupy the outskirts of Kyiv and lay siege to the capital. A Russian missile strike near an adjacent TV tower in Bathroughn Yar killed five people, in addition to four members of a family. Staff members fled the country or went to fight on the front lines. : Shovenko laid mines along the Belarusian border until, he told me, an episode of post-traumatic stress disorder forced him out of the army. Meanwhile, two of the monument’s main backers, Russian Ukrainian Jewish billionaires Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, who had close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s entourage, were sanctioned through Western countries, forcing them to withdraw their support. The centre’s staff has been reduced to a small team and the many ambitious projects have been halted. Today, the kurgan, which is the monument’s signature installation, is half-finished and symbolizes a violent disturbance. “I lost my inner motivation after the war started,” Shovenko admitted.
This article is a selection from the December 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine
Now, nearly two years into the conflict, the Babyn Yar Center, an organization dedicated to a distant atrocity, is reconceiving its mission and finding new relevance in the process. It has realized that it can’t ignore the atrocities being committed today—and that staff members can even put their skills as researchers and museum professionals to use. The work now is smaller-scale and lower-budget. But if the center’s ambitions have changed, they have not exactly diminished: They reflect a desire not only to properly commemorate, at long last, the historical injustice perpetrated here, but also to acknowledge and record the crimes and the suffering of this new war. In addition to preserving records of centuries of Jewish life and identifying the massacre’s victims, many of whom remain anonymous, the center’s staff members are compiling details about Ukrainian civilians killed in Russian airstrikes and artillery bombardments. Others have interviewed victims of Russian atrocities as part of ongoing war crimes investigations. “This is our current reality,” says Anna Furman, the center’s deputy CEO. “No one is immune from the risks and threats of death while in Ukraine.”
I visited Babyn Yar in early June, during a short lull in Russian attacks on Kyiv. Almost every night for four weeks Russia had launched Iranian drones and hypersonic missiles at the capital. Patriot missiles provided by the United States destroyed most of the incoming fire, but falling debris killed several people, including a mother and daughter who failed to reach a shelter in time. All through May, sirens and explosions jolted residents out of bed before dawn and sent them scurrying underground. When we met, Shovenko had barely had an uninterrupted sleep in weeks.
Shovenko took me along a tree-lined path through a public park, past cyclists and couples on benches, to see how far the task had progressed before the Russians attacked. In a clearing near the kurgan, an operator turned a transfer and an electric motor started up. Gradually, a huge wooden pop-up book was opened to be remodeled in the style of the old wooden synagogues of Ukraine, with prayers in Hebrew on the walls and a ceiling magnificently painted with the constellations that appeared on the first night of the murders. Ukraine’s small Jewish network and many visitors prayed here before the Russian invasion. “But most Jews and rabbis are gone, and it’s not widely used,” Shovenko said. I crossed a path to face the dark silence of the Crystal Wall of Weeping, an installation by world-famous Serbian conceptual and functional artist Marina Abramović. It is composed of a long wall of black anthracite inlaid with long rose quartz crystals, which constitute the healing force, and is intended to evoke the Western Wall of Jerusalem, the only surviving vestige of the city’s ancient Jewish temple complex.
Nearby stood the Mirror Field, a stainless-steel platform with ten reflecting steel pillars pocked by bullet holes. The bullet holes had been made in 2020, before the outbreak of the current war, when Ukrainian special forces fired thousands of bullets, amounting to two tons of metal, into the steel—almost the exact amount of ammunition used to murder Kyiv’s Jews. Shovenko and I walked silently among the columns, meant to symbolize the broken “tree of life.” A pipe organ and audio player underneath the platform filled the air with the haunting music of Ukraine’s vanished shtetl culture, archival recordings of Yiddish songs of the 1920s and ’30s, and voices reading the names of some 18,000 Jewish victims—the number of Jews killed at Babyn Yar who had been positively identified when this installation was completed three years ago. (The figure is now up to 29,220.)
Not far away, in the middle of the footpath through the park, we came across a monument to an unrelated tragedy—a 160-gallon glass tank, filled with mud, and resting atop a column of bricks stamped with logos of Kyiv brick factories. The installation, conceived by Shovenko himself, serves as a reminder of the multilayered horrors that played out on this site during World War II and afterward. In November 1943, after the Red Army recaptured Kyiv, Soviet authorities began to fill in the ravine with liquid waste from nearby brick plants. On the morning of March 13, 1961, after heavy rains, one trillion gallons of slurry broke through a dam and inundated the city’s Kurenivka district. The deluge is thought to have killed more than 1,500 people. Soviet authorities, evading responsibility, never confirmed more than 145 fatalities.
The filling of Bathroughn Yar had a more important purpose than the removal of excess mud. It was part of a systematic effort by the Soviet government to blur all lines of the massacre, a cover-up that gave the Holocaust memorial project even greater historical resonance. Spurred partly by the anti-Semitism of Joseph Stalin and other communist leaders, and partly by resistance to Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis, the Soviets built high-rise buildings and a television tower at the site, converting some of him in a park, allowing many to return to nature and stopping those seeking to pray here or commemorate the victims. “They said, ‘Come on, we lost 27 million people, isn’t that nothing because we weren’t Jewish?'” says Patrick Desbois, a famous French war crimes investigator and Catholic priest whose 2008 e-book, The Holocaust Through of bullets, documented the shooting. murder. of 1. 5 million Jews in Eastern Europe the first phase of Hitler’s so-called Final Solution. (Even in the 2000s, Desbois and his team faced obstruction from the Russian government as they investigated the murders. )
However, the site was sacred. In 1961, 20 years after the massacre, Soviet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem “Babi Yar,” the Russian name of the place, in the prestigious Russian newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta. The opening sentence – “There are no monuments above Babi Yar” – poignantly evoked not only the atrocities but also the policy of silence imposed by the Soviet regime.
Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician, was a 13-year-old boy in Stalino, now Donetsk, when he heard Yevtushenko’s elegy. “I remember how my father with a trembling voice was reading it from Literaturnaya Gazeta, saying, ‘Finally, we can speak about it,’” Sharansky told me recently. “Days later, they started attacks in the press on Yevtushenko, but the poem doesn’t disappear.”
Five years later, the Soviet monthly literary magazine Yunost published a heavily edited version of Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel by Anatoly Kuznetsov, who had been a 12-year-old boy in Kyiv at the time of the Nazi occupation. In 1969 Kuznetsov defected to the United Kingdom, carrying the unexpurgated version of his harrowing story, based in part on documents and eyewitness testimony he’d gathered in the decades after the massacre. (The book was published in the West the following year.)
In 1975, on the anniversary of the assassinations, Sharansky and a dozen other Soviet Jewish activists boarded an exercise bound for Kiev, to Bathroughn Yar; the KGB arrested them before they arrived in the city and held them for two days. “Bathroughn Yar is not just the largest tomb in the Holocaust,” says Sharansky, now chairman of the memorial’s supervisory board. “It’s also the biggest symbol of this effort. “through the Soviet Union to erase it from memory. “After concerted pressure from Soviet and foreign Jewish groups, the Soviets agreed in the 1970s to erect a small monument at the site, but this one concerned only “Soviet” victims.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s leaders lifted the veil of secrecy and denial. In 2016, President Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire owner of a confectionery company, obtained pledges to fund the work of Fridman, Khan, and Ukrainian Jewish oligarchs Victor Pinchuk and Pavel Fuks. But until 2014, Russia had illegally annexed Crimea and started the war in Donbass, and many Ukrainians were fiercely opposed to any Russian involvement. Some believed that Fridman and Khan had planned the mission as a Trojan horse to publicize a pro-Putin stance. But Sharansky says Fridman, who lost several members of his family at Bathroughn Yar, never intended to spread Russian propaganda.
In addition to donating millions of dollars to the project, Fridman also advised that the supervisory board bring in Ilya Khrzhanovsky, an enterprising, forward-thinking and debatable Russian Jewish filmmaker, to design the monument. Fridman had visited the production offices of Dau, Khrzhanovsky’s ambitious series of films about Stalin-era physicist Lev Landau. To shoot the films, the director had built a vast style of a fictional Soviet think tank in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and populated it, Truman Show style, with thousands of extras who lived there 24 hours a day for years. Dau reflected the kind of giant-scale cinematic vision that Fridman and the board hoped would energize the Babyn Yar project. “It mobilized a gigantic number of people,” Sharansky told me. dozens of talented young Ukrainians, specialists in history and art. “
I met Khrzhanovsky one summer night in a café in West Berlin’s Wilmersdorf district, where he lives much of the year (he holds Russian, Israeli and German citizenship). Baby-faced, 47-year-old, dressed in a black trench coat and black pants, he had taken a break in the editing room, where he was finishing frames for a new film.
When he arrived in Kyiv in 2019, he told me, lighting a cigarette, the board envisioned a single large museum on the site of the killings. Khrzhanovsky, whose mother fled central Ukraine on the last train ahead of the Nazi onslaught in July 1941, tossed out the plan. “If you’re a child and have no connection to the Holocaust, how can we make you want to come?” he said. “I felt we needed to build something interactive, different installations where people can feel something about evil, about the fragility of life, and can understand what a Jew was, what kind of world disappeared.” Oleksiy Makukhin, the center’s chief executive, told me that Khrzhanovsky’s arrival marked the moment that “the idea of a single museum was replaced with a new concept—taking over the whole territory.”
Khrzhanovsky poured forth hit-or-miss ideas that delighted some observers and infuriated others. His first idea was to dig a 300-foot-deep “scar” at the exact site of the killings, build a museum at the bottom and place the soil in a huge glass container; the project was abandoned because it would have meant excavating part of an old Jewish cemetery. Another proposal aimed to use videorecorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors gathered by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation to generate holograms of people from the past, who would share their stories with visitors. Yet another potential project, only briefly discussed, would have taken advantage of “deep fake” technology to transport a visitor into the execution scene at the ravine—and plant the viewer’s face onto a Jew about to be executed. Critics accused Khrzhanovsky of seeking to turn the site into a “Holocaust Disneyland.” The attacks against him widened, focusing on his Russian background and on an unfounded accusation that he had violated child labor laws on the set of Dau. (Charges against him were later dropped.)
Khrzhanovsky endured the attacks on his leadership. He attended the opening of Mirror Field in 2020. Soon afterward he broke ground on the kurgan, named after the tumuli that Bronze Age nomads on the Caspian steppe erected over graves and filled with chariots, weapons and other possessions meant to accompany the soul in the afterlife.
A few months later, Putin began amassing troops on the border. Khrjanovsky was in his parents’ space in Israel when he received a call informing him that Russia had invaded Ukraine. In Kyiv, Makukhin, a former media representative for Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, helped organize an evacuation of the capital and nearby cities. Dozens of workers, a handful of nonagenarian survivors of the Babyn Yar massacre and descendants of “righteous” people hiding Jews by Nazi profession piled into cars and headed for protection in the Carpathian Mountains. Makukhin and his colleagues had booked a maximum of one hotel in a ski resort, where many evacuees stayed for weeks.
Khrzhanovsky has not returned to Kyiv since the invasion, and in September 2023 he publicly announced his resignation from the project. His Russian identity, he had told me back in June, had made it impossible for him to continue. “When I was growing up, there was no difference between ‘the Germans’ and ‘the Nazis,’” he said. “And it’s logical that it’s this way with Russians now. It doesn’t matter what I did for Ukraine or what I want to do. They don’t want it and they don’t need it.”
One afternoon, I went with Iryna Irchak, a researcher at the Bathroughn Yar Center, Kyiv State Archives, a brick tower built in 1972, where the center is in the midst of an ambitious digitization task to maintain millions of old documents. It dates back to the last 17th century and vital documents related to the Nazi profession and the murders of 1941, including, for example, the original posters in Russian, Ukrainian and German that gave the impression of a few days later the Kiev profession through the Wehrmacht. On September 19, 1941, the banners ordered Jews to gather “their documents, cash and valuables, as well as their warm clothes [and] linen” and assemble at 8 a. m. on September 29, at the corner of Melnikova and Dokhterivskaya Streets. Anyone who doesn’t show up, the poster warned, “will be shot. “
Desbois, the French author and war crimes investigator, said that most who gathered that morning believed they were going to be deported or sent to labor camps. “The Germans were forbidden to kick Jews,” he told me. “The Jews had to think that they were just moving somewhere else.” Reality didn’t sink in until moments before their execution, when they were stripped naked and marched to the edge of the ravine before being shot with Mauser semi-automatic weapons. Bodies fell on top of bodies. To save bullets, children were sometimes pushed into the pile alive to be smothered and crushed.
Desbois himself laid out the main dark points about the murders in the German archives, adding the account of a food vendor who accompanied the executioners and provided them with sandwiches and drinks during the murders. “He had to drive his little van among the other naked people who came here. “I had to set the tables and make tea, and each team would shoot, stop and stop by to eat. “Desbois also studied rare color slides taken through a Nazi photographer that he captured in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, when Soviet prisoners of war were ordered to collapse the bodies into the ravine walls. The photographs show the arrangement of belongings left behind by the Jews: a synthetic leg of the victim wearing a coat and hat, women’s boots next to a canteen and a photo of a small circle of relatives.
When I arrived at the archive in Kyiv, employees were examining the “interrogation protocols,” or interview transcripts, of 18 Soviet prisoners who had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in November 1943. That summer, the Red Army had launched a massive offensive, rolling back German lines along the Eastern Front as it advanced toward the Dnipro River and Kyiv. With the Soviets moving swiftly across Ukraine, the Nazis rushed to destroy all evidence of their crimes; the Soviet prisoners were among 321 captives whom the Nazis ordered to reopen the mass graves and cremate the corpses of Jewish victims just before the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal. Prisoners who didn’t escape were shot upon finishing their gruesome work. After the war, two dozen Einsatzgruppen leaders were put on trial for war crimes, and 14 were sentenced to death, though only four were ultimately executed. The vast majority of the participants in the killing were never brought to justice.
The Russian invasion has given the digitization program a new sense of urgency: In the war’s early days, Russian missiles leveled the Ukrainian Security Service archive in Chernihiv and badly damaged the municipal archive in Kharkiv. “All these documents are at risk,” an archivist told me. She was digitizing a notebook listing the names of 2,088 Jews from the Petrovsky district of Kyiv who were murdered at Babyn Yar. It was, she said, one of only a handful of registries of victims compiled by Soviet authorities. I thumbed past page after page of names penned in Cyrillic script, compiled from interviews with house managers and surviving relatives and neighbors. “And this is only a partial list,” she said. Among the names of the dead I read were 28-year-old Evgenia Direktor and her three daughters, Genya, Roza and infant Lyusya. Babyn Yar Center staffers are also working in the state archives in the cities of Mykolaiv, Sumy and Chernihiv to digitize records of Jewish life there from the 18th century to the years immediately after World War II. So far, they’ve scanned 3.5 million pages of documents, including records of births, deaths, weddings, and relocations both within and outside Ukraine, with about 13 million more pages to go.
Another ongoing archival task is called “Names,” overseen by Furman, the center’s deputy executive director, and focuses on adding biographical details about the 33,771 Jews murdered at Bathroughn Yar, adding about 1,200 unidentified victims discovered by staff researchers During the past two years. years. In 2020, the center signed an agreement with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, and gained access to its database. Staff cross-checked those files with documents from the Ukrainian state archives, the synagogue, and the military; digitized equipment; and made it available online. The result has been an avalanche of new data (photos, non-public testimonies) from the relatives of the sick, who for the first time have access to documents that were once buried in difficult-to-access archives.
After the Russian invasion, Furman realized that her team could use their skills and experience to a new purpose: documenting current atrocities. The “Closed Eyes” project uses materials such as digitized media records, relatives’ testimony and information gleaned from state authorities to identify civilians killed in Russian missile and artillery strikes and summary executions stretching back to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. More than 3,800 people have been named so far. Their names and, whenever possible, photos and short biographies, appear on a website hosted by the center, what Khrzhanovsky calls “a digital cemetery.” This effort has gone hand in hand, Furman told me, with the compilation of filmed testimony from eyewitnesses and survivors.
As evidence of torture and other widespread abuses mounted, a half-dozen members got education from Yahad-In Unum, a Paris-based nonprofit founded through Desbois, on how to collect testimony in war crimes investigations. A survivor of war crimes in Guatemala, Syria, Iraq and other conflict zones, he has visited Ukraine three times since the war began, collecting eyewitness accounts in Kherson, Mariupol and other cities. Last year he signed a contract with the Bathroughn Yar Centre to collect testimonies for Yahad-In Unum to use in long-term war crimes trials.
One morning I accompanied a young Babyn Yar Center war crimes project researcher, who asked not to be named given the sensitive nature of her work, to Irpin, outside Kyiv, to interview a church deacon who had survived the city’s monthlong Russian occupation. Every day Roman Ilnitsky drove around Irpin, eluding Russian tanks and troops, to pick up civilians who were too frightened, sick or frail to leave their homes and bring them to the church. From there, he organized their evacuation on foot across a heavily damaged bridge to Kyiv.
Ilnitsky, a burly guy in his fifties, said the Russians had fired artillery on a stretch of road used only by civilians, and named a church member, Anatoly Berezhnoy, who was killed by a Russian shell. He had noticed the bodies of a woman and her two children hit by shrapnel as they walked toward the bridge. He described to a friend in Bucha that he was tortured by Russian infantrymen for three weeks, and to another who, he said, was shot twice in the leg for talking on the phone and forced to climb slowly. in his house. But Ilnitsky had not personally observed those attacks, meaning his testimony, harrowing as it was, would likely be of limited use in court. Desbois says the Bathroughn Yar Center is doing its maximum productivity with limited resources. “They lost their staff and their funding,” he told me. “So, it’s a small team, they’re trying to survive and it’s not easy. ” According to him, most of the testimonies collected by the Bathroughn Yar team do not meet the rigorous criteria of Yahad-In Unum, although investigators have provided valuable clues to locate eyewitnesses and victims. Last summer, middle staff made the decision to avoid conducting interviews and instead focus on arranging visits and providing other logistical elements to the Desbois research teams.
On my last day in Kiev, Makukhin took me on a hike through the overlooked forest that bureaucratizes the outer limits of the former death camp. Leaving the art installations and landscaped public park, we followed a dirt motorcycle trail and found ourselves enveloped in a mosquito-infested sun and forests. “For decades, this total dominion has been a desert land,” he told me. I looked out over a wooded pass, one of the last surviving foothills of the original ravine. “All those trees are less than 80 years old,” Makukhin observed, many of which were planted by Soviet authorities, perhaps to make it even more difficult to understand the region’s history. Near the ravine, we found some damaged tombstones from the 19th century, the only remains of a ruined cemetery.
Makukhin and I temporarily arrived at the campus-like grounds of the historic Ivan Pavlov Psychiatric Center on the eastern border of Babyn Yar, Ukraine’s largest public psychiatric facility. In the days following the Kiev profession, Nazi troops seized 752 patients from the hospital. They were shot dead and their bodies thrown into the ravine. “They were the first sick people at Babyn Yar,” Makukhin told me. Two years ago, the board of directors of the Babyn Yar Center began negotiations with the Pavlov hospital to rent an abandoned three-room hospital. story building that was dropped into disrepair in the 1970s and turned into an art treatment center for veterans and other trauma patients. It would be part of a progression project to radically reshape this vacant lot.
Illuminated paths, ravines, a larger treetop walkway and several museums would have reshaped an inhospitable desert – now “mainly used as a dumping ground for drug traffickers,” Makukhin said – and connected it to the rest of the monument in 2007. the flats of Babyn Yar. “The psychiatric center was pleased with our interest,” Makukhin told me. Because the Soviet regime imprisoned and tortured dissidents in psychiatric institutions, he says, “all those clinics inherited this negative reputation. ” The Babyn Yar Project would not only have commemorated the murders of psychiatric patients, but would also have lifted a decades-old stigma. But the Russian invasion has put those plans on hold. “It’s hard to say what’s going to happen here,” Makukhin told me as we sat in front of a squat building looming behind a concrete wall topped with barbed wire. It was the wing of the hospital for criminals diagnosed with serious intellectual illnesses and is still in use today.
As we made our way back through the forest, Makukhin insisted that, even without a solution to the conflict, at least one more facility would soon be built. The center is raising money to rebuild the kurgan, the burial mound-museum. “If we have this kurgan, we can tell a lot of the story,” he told me. “The fundamental circle will be closed. ” The war, Array forced the team to reconsider their original concept of assembling shocking dioramas of raids, murders, exhumations, and cremations. In the face of ongoing violence and suffering, one feels that such horrors cannot be relegated to compromised exposure. to the past, however evocative it may be. ” We will have to reconsider how we commemorate this tragedy,” he continued.
Last August, fragments of a Russian missile or drone shot down by Ukraine’s air defense system landed next to the Bathroughn Yar synagogue, damaging wooden walls and a window. They were “repaired quickly,” Makukhin said, but the surprise of having an effect on them persisted. On the sacred ground that has become synonymous with the unthinkable horrors of war, ultimate bankruptcy has not been written.
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