Ukraine marks 70 years since Babi Yar massacre of Jews

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych on Monday led tributes to tens of thousands of Jews shot by the Nazis at the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev 70 years ago, one of the Holocaust's deadliest massacres.

The Nazis murdered 33,771 Jews in western Kiev between September 29-30, 1941, in an atrocity that has only been properly commemorated in recent years.

Several hundred people, many in tears, gathered at the former execution site -- now a simple park dotted with monuments -- to honour the memory of their loved ones in a series of ceremonies attended by Yanukovych and Israel's foreign minister.

"Eighteen members of my Jewish family died here," said Raisa Maistrenko, tears welling in her eyes.

"I was rescued and am alive thanks to a Ukrainian woman," she said.

"I feel like a tiny speck of sand that should have disappeared in this hell," she added, noting she was three years old in 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

"Everyone needs to know about this tragedy," said Oleg Kaluzhinsky, 72, speaking near the iconic stone monument in the shape of a Jewish menorah candelabrum.

He said his wife's relatives were executed at Babi Yar and that he has visited the site every year since the early 1990s.

Earlier in the day a delegation of top officials led by Yanukovych, Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman placed crimson roses at the memorial and honoured the memory of the victims with a minute of silence.

"It is difficult to fully comprehend the events that occurred in Babi Yar. It is difficult to find the words to express all the depth of our condolences and sorrow," Yanukovych said in comments released ahead of the ceremony.

"More and more, time is increasing our distance from these horrible events. But the memory is alive," he added.

Ahead of his Kiev visit, Lieberman called the Babi Yar ravine "a prominent symbol of the hell on earth that the Jews of Europe experienced" during the Holocaust.

Shortly after Nazi forces pushed the Soviet authorities out of Kiev in 1941 and occupied the city, they ordered its entire remaining Jewish population to assemble on the pretext of being resettled.

The Nazi occupiers blamed the Jews of Kiev for a sequence of explosions that in fact had been set off by remaining agents of the Soviet NKVD or were time bombs left by the Red Army before their departure.

The resettlement story was a carefully hidden lie. The Nazis marched the Jews to the Babi Yar ravine on the outskirts of the city where they were shot dead.

The massacre was the subject of the revered early 1960s 13th Symphony of Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich, who set to music the poem "Babi Yar" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

As well as the worst shooting massacre of the Holocaust by the Nazis, it was also the first wartime extermination of the Jews from a major city.

The Nazis used Babi Yar as an execution site until they quit Kiev in 1943. At least 100,000 more Jews, Roma, resistance fighters and Soviet prisoners were executed although the exact figure remains the subject of debate.

The massacre was played down by the postwar Soviet Union, which was keen not to allow the suffering of the Jews to interfere with the authorities' assertion that the Soviet people had been the main victims of the war.

A memorial put up in 1976 did not mention the Jews. The authorities only allowed a memorial to the murdered Jews to be built in 1991.

"At Babi Yar there are no monuments/ A great cliff like a rough headstone," are the incendiary first lines of Yevtushenko's poem.

Even in 2009, a public and international outcry forced the mayor of Kiev to block a plan to build at the site a hotel that would house visiting football fans for the Euro 2012 football championships.

Speaking to Lieberman later in the day, the Ukrainian president stressed that representatives of various nationalities and religions peacefully co-existed in modern-day Ukraine.

"Mankind makes conclusions from the Babi Yar tragedy and the tormented death of thousands of people stays alive in memory," Yanukovych said.