President Isaac Herzog addressed the international gathering on Wednesday marking 80 years since the Babi Yar massacre in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sept. 29-30, 1941 – one of the most infamous Nazi mass slaughters of the Holocaust.
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Speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and other leaders, Herzog took part in inaugurating the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
The BYHMC is being established to commemorate the stories of the 2.5 million Jews of Eastern Europe, including 1.5 million from Ukraine alone, who were murdered and buried in mass graves near their homes by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.
Nearly 34,000 Jews were killed within 48 hours in Babi Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, when the city was under Nazi occupation in 1941. SS troops carried out the massacre with local collaborators.
In his speech, Herzog recited the Yizkor, the Jewish memorial prayer for the dead: "There is an ancient Jewish prayer called Yizkor. In the Jewish calendar, we usually recite Yizkor – the prayer to elevate the souls of the departed – be they relatives, or people whose deaths had national significance – on the most sacred dates and festivals for our people."
"This past month, we marked several of these occasions. With your permission, as President of the State of Israel, the state of the Jewish People, I would like to recite the Yizkor prayer, for the elevation of the souls of our brothers and sisters. Babies, children, women, men, and the elderly. Shot, massacred, and murdered in cold blood here, a place that became the biggest mass grave on European soil, in the valley of death of Babi Yar. In the most terrible tragedy to befall the Jewish People and the family of humanity, at mankind's darkest hour: the Holocaust. There was nobody to recite the Yizkor prayer for them.
"May God remember the souls of our brethren, Children of Israel, victims of the Holocaust and its heroes, the souls of the six million of Israel who were killed, murdered, suffocated, and buried alive and the holy communities destroyed for the sanctification of the Name. May God remember their binding, with the binding of all of Israel's other martyrs and heroes since time immemorial, and may he bind their souls up in the bond of life. Those gentle and beloved in their lives; in their deaths, not separated. May they rest in peace, and may we say Amen."
Herzog continued: "I come here as the President of the State of Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish People. I come here from Jerusalem, our eternal capital. In the heart of Jerusalem, in the Israeli Parliament – the Knesset – on the government floor is a painting by the painter Joseph Kuzkovsky, who was born in Ukraine and studied art in Kyiv. "Led to the Slaughter – Babi Yar" is its name."
"It shows men, women, and children, walking in silence, in deathly darkness, the jackboots of the Nazi devil and local police officers pointing their weapons at them, setting sharp-fanged dogs on them.
"In the middle of the painting – which nobody who has ever seen it, even once, can ever forget – is a woman, holding in one hand her young daughter, and in the other clutching her baby to her chest. Surrounded by parents and children, brothers and sisters, all together, on their way to their terrifying death. Here, in the heart of darkness.
"Thousands of times have I walked up those stairs, and time and again, I paused and looked at the picture. I felt a pinch in my heart, appalled by the atrocity. I thought about how at the end of that walk, these Jews were stripped naked, thrown into this valley of death, and massacred in a hail of bullets, here at Babi Yar.
"Every time leaders from around the world visited, I showed them this picture and told them the story of the massacre at Babi Yar. A chapter that must be studied till the last generation.
"There was no colder or more awful act of murder, no more murderous representation of the "Holocaust by bullets," than the Baby Yar Massacre.
"There is no escaping the terrible thought that the sun rose over this valley. The birds chirped. The forest was quiet. And the butchers – they butchered.
"For two days, the machine guns of the Nazis' death squads and, alas, also local collaborators mowed down tens of thousands of the Jews of Kyiv and the region. Whole families were erased," Herzog said.
"Let us make no mistake: Even in the present, Holocaust denial is still alive and kicking. Antisemitism still exists. Just in the past day, we all heard of another ugly manifestation of antisemitism at the Auschwitz extermination camp in the form of antisemitic graffiti that disgraces the memory of the people killed at this terrible death camp. We, world leaders, must vigorously condemn the slightest hint of this phenomenon and fight it with all our might," the Israeli president added.
Last year, a number of memorials, including synagogue prayer space, were installed as part of the construction of a massive, innovative museum complex across the whole Babi Yar area. The establishment of the center is being overseen by public figures and leaders from around the world, headed by Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the supervisory board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
"Babi Yar is the biggest mass grave of the Holocaust ... the most quickly filled mass grave," said Sharansky.
"It's hard to breathe at this place – thousands of children took their last breath here," Zelenskyy said. "It's hard to stand here – thousands of bullets knocked people down here in Babi Yar. The earth was trembling from the convulsions of people who were still alive and trying to get out."
"For us Germans, there can only be one response: never again!" Steinmeier said.
The center also revealed the initial 159 names of hundreds of Nazi troops who took part in the massacre.
"Despite confessions, evidence and testimonies being submitted as late as the 1960s by some of the Nazi soldiers who carried out the murders, only a few of those involved ever faced justice for their heinous crimes," it said.
"They were between 20 and 60 years old," the memorial center said. "They were educated and uneducated, they included engineers and teachers, drivers and salespeople. Some were married and some were not. The vast majority of them returned to live a normal life after the war. They testified at trial and were found not guilty, except for very few commanders, not the soldiers who carried out the horrific massacre."
Father Patrick Desbois, head of the center's academic council, said some of the 159 Nazi troops named "were shooters. Others extracted the Jews from their homes. Others took their belongings and their luggage. Others armed the weapons while others were serving sandwiches, tea and vodkas to the shooters. All of them are guilty."
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The three presidents on Wednesday attended the opening of a new memorial – the "Crystal Crying Wall" created by conceptual artist Marina Abramovic. Within six months, the first museum space will be unveiled.
"We are going to give the real faces to the Holocaust, whether it's the faces of the victims, of the executors or those who were helping to save Jews," Sharansky said.
He noted that while some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazi killers, at least 2,600 Ukrainian families were hiding Jews at the risk of their own lives.
"So we are going to recover the names of victims, and we are recovering more and more names of victims, the names of those who were saving Jews and the names of collaborators," he said.
