Anger as Kiev council plans to build hotel at biggest Holocaust shooting site

Euro 2012 football fans may be housed where 33,771 Jews died

The biggest mass murder by shooting of the Holocaust occurred during two days in late September 1941. Then, 33,771 Ukrainian Jews – by the Nazis' own accounts – were ordered to gather at a Jewish cemetery near a ravine called Babi Yar, on the outskirts of the capital, Kiev. They believed they were going to be transported for resettlement in work camps.

Instead they were machine-gunned in small groups by two lines of German SS Einsatzcommando troops assisted by Ukrainian auxiliary police and local Nazi collaborators. Their bodies were pushed into the gorge, where they were later buried.

Now Babi Yar, one of the most sensitive sites for Ukrainian Jews, has been slated by Kiev's city council for the building of a hotel to house visiting football fans for Euro 2012, opening a new chapter in its already controversial history.

The proposal, discussed at a closed meeting of the city council last week, has been described to both the Ukrainian and Israeli media by a member of Kiev's city council, Serhy Melnik, a political opponent of the city's major, Leonid Chernovetsky.

Melnik has told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that 67 of Kiev's city councillors approved the hotel plan without knowing what they were voting for.

According to Melnik, the Babi Yar site has been included in a list of dozens of the city's parks and other open spaces earmarked for possible construction of hotels to house the hundreds of thousands of football supporters expected for the competition, which is being co-hosted with Poland.

The decision has attracted controversy in the Israeli media and angered some members of Kiev's city council, not least Melnik, who is using the issue to attack the council leadership.

While the city council has admitted that a development plan exists for Euro 2012, it has so far refused to discuss the details.

The controversy has been clouded by the fact that the area already has an underground station and some other buildings, structures that some leaders of the city's Jewish community believe should not have been built in the first place.

They argue that there are two issues at stake: firstly the proposed new hotel would probably be built within an area that many have been campaigning for years to have designated as a national memorial to the massacre. The second issue is of consistency. According to Kiev's chief rabbi, Yakov Bleich, when members of the Jewish community proposed building a museum and religious complex in the same area in 2006 their plans ran into city opposition.

"What we know," Bleich told the Guardian today, "is that a resolution was passed by the city council for a hotel in Babi Yar. There is an underground already there and no one screamed. But perhaps people should have screamed."

Bleich added that he hoped that the concern now being expressed would ensure the hotel was not built, but added: "We do have to be very alert."

The development plans are doubly sensitive because of the postwar history of the massacre site. For decades of Soviet rule, Babi Yar lacked any memorial to the killings. The Soviet Union discouraged any remembrance that singled out the Jewish character of a large part of the atrocity, a fact that inspired both Yevgeny Yevtushenko's dissident poem of 1961 poem, Babi Yar, and Dmitri Shostakovich's 1962 Symphony Number 13, based on the poem.

When the Soviet regime finally did erect a memorial in 1976 it was to "Soviet citizens" who lost their lives. It was only in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and 50 years after the slaughter, that a memorial was unveiled for the Jewish victims, most of whom perished in two days and nights of killing on 29 and 30 September.

Although Babi Yar is most remembered for the massacre of Kiev's Jewish community, the Nazis used the ravine for mass murder until they retreated from the Soviet Union. Their victims there included Soviet PoWs, members of the Ukrainian resistance, Roma and mentally ill people. In all, it is estimated that between 70,000 and 120,000 people were killed there, but some estimates suggest that as many as 200 ,000 may have died.

The plan to build in Kiev's parks, including close to the Babi Yar memorial park, has been driven by a lack of tourist accommodation in Kiev, which has only 125 hotels and 17,000 beds.

The Babi Yar memorial park, with its trees and lawns, features several monuments, including a substantial statue and a stone menorah carved with ghostly hooded figures.

The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict by Peter Beaumont is published by Harvill Secker.

Memorial battle

In 1947 Ilya Ehrenburg in his novel Burya (The Storm) dramatically described the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar. Preparations were made for a memorial to the victims of Nazi genocide, but this was never erected.

On 10 October 1959 the novelist Viktor Nekrasov cried out in the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta for a memorial at Babi Yar, and against the official intention to transform the ravine into a sports stadium.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko's famous poem, Babi Yar, which denounces the Soviet distortion of history concerning the massacre of Kiev's Jews, was published on 19 September 1961. Dmitri Shostakovich used the poem as part of his 13th Symphony, a powerful piece of music that caused a sensation when premiered in Moscow in 1962.

An official memorial was not built at the site until 1976, but did not mention that most victims were Jews. It took a further 15 years before a new memorial (Menorah) was built, which today serves as a place for commemorative ceremonies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/24/hotel-kiev-holocaust-germany-babi-yar