Survivors of the Holocaust that wasn’t

Dignitaries gathered in the Ukraine yesterday to commemorate the 65th anniversary of one of the worst massacres of Jews in the Holocaust:

The massacre began on Sept. 29, 1941, when Soviet Kiev’s Nazi occupiers ordered all Jews to report to a ravine on the outskirts of town.

The Jews thought they would be taken to a ghetto, and Kiev residents recalled their Jewish neighbors lugging their most valuable belongings out to the ravine.

But when they got there, the Jews were forced to undress and gather in lines along the ravine’s steep embankment. There, the Nazis machine-gunned down the crowd, killing at least 33,771 over 48 hours. In the ensuing months, the number of people killed at Babi Yar grew to more than 100,000.

“I saw how the Germans were laughing and joking when they looked at the people they were bringing to their death,” said Nina Isayeva, 82, who came to pay tribute to the victims. “What barbarians they were.”

Moshe Kantor, founder of the World Holocaust Forum that is organizing the events, said that the world’s silence after Babi Yar emboldened the Nazis to embark on their “final solution” of death camps that ultimately killed six million European Jews.

This is one of the events that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks needs more study. I think so, too. Because of this:

The exact death toll at Babi Yar remains unknown. The Nazi executioners recorded the number of Jews killed in the first two days, but there are no exact records of subsequent killings. In 1943, as the Red Army approached to free Ukraine, the Nazis ordered Jewish prisoners to dig up the corpses and burn them.

The Nazis did their best to cover the evidence of their crimes in the final days of the war. They knew. They knew what they were doing, even as they were doing it—or they wouldn’t have tried to cover it up.

The next time that the palestinians, or the Lebanese, or the anti-Israel crowd shrieks “massacre” over two or eight or thirty dead—send them here. Or here. Or here. The next time one of the anti-Israel crowds shrieks that the Israelis are just like the Nazis, send them here. The next time the so-called anti-Zionists compares the IDF tactics to Nazi tactics—send them here.