The massacre at Babyn Yar was remembered by community leaders on Tuesday at the site near Kiev where more than 33,000 Jews were murdered in 1941.
The chief rabbi of the Netherlands, Binyomin Jacobs spoke, reading the kaddish.
The assembled dignitaries bowed and clasped their hands in otherwise silent mourning, standing entirely still despite the minus-eight cold.
Earlier, an Israeli man who is thought to be the last survivor of Babyn Yar, Michael Sidko, spoke by video link to delegates of the European Jewish Association symposium in Kiev’s Hilton.
Mr Sidko was six years old when a neighbour reported his family to the Gestapo three times as being Jewish, and they were arrested and brought to Babyn Yar.
The family were directed to “the pit” where Nazi officers supervised the killings.
As his mother held her baby son Volodya in her arms, his three-year-old sister Clara walked beside tugging at her skirt, and he and his older brother Grisha brought up the rear.
Clara ran up to Mr Sidko, he said, and asked to be carried in his arms. A policeman hit the girl in the head, knocking her to the ground.
He stamped on her chest until she stopped breathing. Mr Sidko’s mother saw this and fainted, dropping Volodya.
The policeman stamped on Volodya until he was dead.
Mr Sidko’s mother came round and screamed. She was shot, and all three bodes were hauled by the legs thrown into the pit.
The two brothers were selected for medical testing or forced labour and so permitted to live, Mr Sidko said, before a Russian or Ukrainian guard allowed them to run away.
“Hitler’s greatest mistake was making Auschwitz,” said Father Patrick of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, because the camp became evidence of Nazi crimes against humanity.
But at Babyn Yar there was “no train, no railway, just a mass grave”.
Mr Sidko long refused to talk about the massacre or even mention his Jewish identity to even his own children.
It was only in 2000 that he told his children they were Jewish and the family made aliyah.
“People should study history,” he added.“Students should be taught to love not hate.”
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/last-survivor-of-massacre-reveals-the-horror-of-babyn-yar-rHBFu0qobRGTTFoyk3GRm
