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Ukrainian Team Researches Babyn Yar Massacre
WORLD BY CNAAN LIPHSHIZ | JTA.ORG
FOR MOST OF his life, all the
information Igor Kulakov had
about his paternal great-grand-
parents was their picture, their
names and the fact that they
had been murdered during the
Holocaust. The assumption in his
family had always been that
Sheindle and Mordechai Sova
were shot at Babyn Yar (often
spelled “Babi Yar”), a ravine on
Kyiv’s outskirts where German
troops massacred at least
33,000 Jews in September 1941
in one of the largest massacres
of the Holocaust.

But beyond that, he was
unable to unearth any further
details, even after attempting to
research the subject in the Kyiv
city archives. As he grew older,
the uncertainty began to have a
psychological effect on him.

“I would get physically ill
whenever I needed to pass near
Babyn Yar,” he said.

But in recent months,
Kulakov, a 45-year-old linguist
who lives near Kyiv with his wife
and three children, has been
able to fill in many of the blanks
thanks to a new research project
led by the Babyn Yar Holocaust
Memorial Center, an organiza-
tion established in 2016 to build a
Holocaust museum in Kyiv. The
center’s Names project — which
began last year and has led to
the identification of 800 Babyn
Yar victims whose fates had been
previously unknown — provided
Kulakov with the couple’s former
address, age, place of burial, as
well as the terrible specifics of
their final hours.

The lack of such identi-
fying details is not unusual
for Holocaust victims from
present-day Ukraine, where
some 1.5 million Jews were
killed by firing squad between
1941 and 1943, often with
minimal paperwork. Ukraine’s
so-called “Holocaust by bullets”
10 OCTOBER 1, 2020
happened more sporadically,
rapidly and chaotically than
in the death camps. There is
so little information on what
happened at Babyn Yar that
the total death toll — including
Jews, psychiatric patients,
prisoners of war, suspected
Ukrainian nationalists and
communists — ranges between
70,000 and 100,000 victims.

The Names project has so
far collected data on about
18,000 people who were killed
at Babyn Yar. Of those, only a
few thousand have comprehen-
sive person files. Information
on many of the others is
patchy, sometimes limited to
nothing more than their names,
according to Alexander Belikov,
a senior researcher at the center.

The paucity owes to a mix
of factors, including the lack of
German documentation, massive
wartime damage to Kyiv’s
archives, decades of obfuscation
when Ukraine was part of the
Soviet Union, and an outdated
archiving methodology that
downplayed the importance of
individual stories.

“In the Soviet period, and also
sometimes after that, the histor-
ical methodology in Ukraine
placed very little emphasis on
individuals, despite the early
efforts of some researchers to
give victims a face,” Belikov said.

When Kulakov consulted
archives for traces of his
great-grandparents, all he
found was a Soviet-era registry
of civilian war casualties that
listed their last name, last known
address, year of birth and two
serial numbers: 1868 and 1869.

“It didn’t even have their
first names,” he recalled.

Thanks to the project,
Kulakov learned that his
great-grandparents were
wholesale food merchants,
traveling often to arrange
shipments from the country-
side to the city. On one such
trip, during the Holodomor
famine of 1932, they took in
a starving girl whose mother
Stray dogs roam the Babyn Yar
monument in Kyiv, where Nazis and
local collaborators murdered more
than 30,000 Jews in 1941.

Cnaan Liphshiz via JTA.org
Mordechai and Sheindle Sova
were shot in 1941 on a central
street of Kyiv, Ukraine, and buried
in a ditch after they ignored the
order to gather to be murdered at
Babyn Yar.

Courtesy of Igor Kulakov
and the Babyn Yar Holocaust
Memorial Center via JTA.org
could no longer support her.

The research also helped
ascertain that Mordechai and
Sheindle didn’t die at Babyn Yar
after all. They had disobeyed the
order to report for deportation
which, in reality, was a call for
Jews to be rounded up for murder.

They were betrayed to police
in October 1941 and executed
on the spot, but not before the
woman whose daughter they
saved convinced them to part
with their own daughter Freuda,
Kulakov’s grandmother. Their
burial place is on Nyzhnii Val
Street in Podil, a neighborhood
in the center of Kyiv not far from
their last known address.

Researchers were able to pull
together this story by following
leads to locate information
in physical archives across
Ukraine. They also use various
search algorithms to mine
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digitized archives. Some of the
information about Mordechai
and Sheindle came from a
tip that led to archives in the
Ukrainian city of Fastiv, which
turned out to be where the
Sovas bought their products.

“We’ll interview relatives
to get leads, and then cross
reference that with relevant
archives,” Belikov said.

Other victims whom the
project lifted out of anonymity
include Aba Yakovlevich and
Clara Abramovna Kaganovich, a
Jewish couple who were 48 when
they were murdered at Babyn
Yar. In the weeks following
the Nazi invasion, they used
their connections — Aba was a
prominent jurist — to get their
only daughter and her newly
married husband a spot aboard
a train headed for Russia.

Having achieved that, they
made no further attempts to
escape themselves, their file states.

The project team obtained a copy
of testimony by the concierge at
the couple’s building, who said
that after the deportation order
came, he “helped them aboard” a
horse-drawn carriage bound for
Babyn Yar.

Researchers hope to eventu-
ally have a web page for each
identified victim, complete
with their life story and picture.

Kulakov concedes that learning
the specifics of Mordechai and
Sheindle’s last days is gruesome
and that he still avoids Babyn
Yar even now.

“But it’s better to know —
much better,” he said. “Only
when you know do you have
any hope of moving forward.

That’s true for an individual
person, and it’s true for a
nation as a whole.” l
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