August 14, 2017
Nazi troops unloaded dozens of stolen Jewish gravestones in the same place of Babi Yar near Kiev, where they murdered tens of thousands of Jews, they discovered investigators in the Ukraine.
Last month, the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center collected 50 tombstones in Babi Yar, where Nazis and local collaborators murdered more than 150,000 people, including 50,000 Jews, as of September 1941.
“The tombstones were removed from a local Jewish cemetery during the Holocaust and thrown into the same ravines where more than 150,000 Jews, Gypsies and Ukrainians were killed during the Holocaust,” said Marek Siwiec, a former Polish politician and current head of the memorial center, a statement about the discovery.
With the mandate of the Ukrainian government, the Siwiec organization, created last year, spearheads international efforts to commemorate the Babi Yar tragedy in a manner commensurate with the scale of the tragedy. The Jewish victims are commemorated at the site only by an unfenced six-foot menorah, which is located near a landfill for industrial waste and is regularly vandalized.
“The meaning of Babi Yar is of the utmost importance, in this horribly difficult place, the greatest act of mass murder of the Jews took place during the Holocaust, where 37,771 people were brutally murdered during a period of two days, it is our duty not only remember this site, but also an active way to learn about the darkest days of human history to build a better future, “Siwiec said in the statement about the discovery.