Thu 10/14 @ 3PM
There’s no bottom to the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Germany. But one of the most notorious was the massacre at Babi Yar in Kiev in Ukraine, where, on two days in September 1941, Nazis rounded up more than 30,000 people herded them into the Babi Yar ravine and shot them. It was one of the largest mass massacres perpetrated by the Nazis in such a short time frame. (A similar, smaller massacre of Jews by the Nazis occurred in Bykhov in Belarus about the same time, the town my great-grandparents emigrated from, fortunately moving to the U.S. in the 1870s.) And that wasn’t the end of it: the Nazis continued to round up not only Jews, but Communists, gypsies, Ukrainian nationalists and other “undesirables,” killing in excess of 100,000 over the course of their occupation of the city.
In conjunction with its new exhibit Stories of Survival, opening on October 27, the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage is presenting a film series on the topic of the Holocaust and genocide in general. It opens with Boris Maftsir’s The Road to Babi Yar, which addresses the incursion of the Nazis into Soviet territory starting in June 1941 and the beginning of their massacre of Jews there. It looks at the first 100 days of the occupation and how they Nazis developed and ramped up their mass murder blueprint. It features interviews with historians as well as survivors and witnesses to these horrific events.
Participants will get a link to watch the film online, then join a Zoom talkback afterwards, with Latvian-born Israeli filmmaker Maftsir and Israeli scholar Avi Ben-Hur.
To register for the virtual event, go here.
maltzmuseum/virtual-documentary-film-series-the-road-to-babi-yar/