This moving and pioneering book, the work of a major scholar of antisemitism in Imperial and Soviet Russia and of the Holocaust, is an investigation of a key topic in the mass murder of the Jews in Ukraine during World War II and the problems that have arisen in its memorialization. The Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv was one of the principal killing grounds of Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II. Between the end of September and the end of October 1941, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered there virtually all the Jews who had remained in the city after the flight of the Soviet authorities. On 29 and 30 September alone, nearly 34,000 men, women, and children were shot there, one of the largest mass killings in the Holocaust. In all, probably 70,000–80,000 Jews were killed at Babyn Yar, although, as Dr. Khiterer shows, it is impossible to give an exact figure, and some scholars have estimated their number to be as high as 100,000. Many non-Jews, among them Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists, members of the underground, Orthodox priests, and mentally ill people were also murdered in Babyn Yar. Khiterer cites the work of Sergiy Karamash Babyn yar - u tragichnykh podiiakh 1941–1943 rokiv. Istoria i Suchasnist’ (istoriko-arkhivne doslidzhennia) [Babyn Yar in the tragic events of 1941–1943. History and Present: a historical-archival study] (Kyiv, 2014) who claims that the number of non-Jewish victims was between 50,000 and 60,000, a figure which is probably too high (3). The number of non-Jews who were murdered in Babyn Yar has also often been conflated with the significantly larger number of Kyivans who lost their lives during Nazi occupation of the city—the non-Jewish population of the city decreased between 1940 and 1947 by about 134,000 (19 percent). The site has thus also become, in Khiterer’s words, “a symbol of universal suffering for the gentile population” (95).

The first chapter of this very well-documented study is a path-breaking account of the situation of Kyivan Jews in the years from the Bolshevik revolution to the Nazi occupation. That introduction is followed by chapters describing first the murder of the Jews of Kyiv in Babyn Yar and then the massacre there of other victims of the Nazis, making extensive use of contemporary testimony as well as family memories of the author. Given the fact that the victims included both Jews and non-Jews, including many Ukrainians, the question of how to memorialize those murdered in Babyn Yar has proved difficult and controversial. Most of the victims were Jews and, as a result, because of state and popular antisemitism in Kyiv, no monument was erected for many years. The site thus became a symbol of how the Soviets and the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic failed to recognize the Holocaust. This led to protests from leading non-Jewish cultural figures, such as the essay of the well-known novelist Victor Nekrasov in 1959, Yevgeni Yevtushenko’s poem Baby Yar, written in 1961 and set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich, and Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel published in Russian in a censored form in 1966.

Mounting pressure to establish a monument subsequently led to the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture establishing a “Closed competition for a monument at Babyn Yar” in 1965. None of the projects submitted were accepted, and it took another eleven years before a monument was finally erected. In the intervening period, numerous protests were held on the site. In accordance with Soviet policy of downplaying the Holocaust, the monument set up in 1976 did not mention Jews and was dedicated to “Over one hundred thousand citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of war killed in 1941–3 by German fascists” (194). Designed by the well-established Ukrainian sculptor Mykhailo Lysenko, but completed by his assistants Oleksandr Vitryk and Victor Sukhenko, the monument’s complex and eclectic character and the disputes about what it should depict are well described in the book. Originally, it portrayed a young mother with her hands tied behind her back, breastfeeding her baby, intended by the sculptor to symbolize the triumph of life over death. To this was added two nude dying youths who have fallen from a cliff, together with a young dying woman and a girl weeping over the body of an old man. Under pressure from the authorities, three more conventional Soviet figures depicting a worker, a soldier, and a sailor were included. In his “Report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust,” Elie Wiesel, who visited the site in August 1979 wrote: “The monument is most impressive, set in the centre of a ravine where the victims were buried. However, both in content and inscription, the memorial is devoid of any reference, direct or oblique to the fact that the Jews [sic] were killed at Babi Yar” (300).

The situation changed with the end of communism and the emergence of an independent Ukraine. This led in 1991 to the setting up of a memorial Menorah, designed by Yury Paskevich, B. Giller, and Yakim and Aleksander Levich and subsequently to more than thirty additional monuments. These subsequent monuments commemorated many different groups who had been murdered in the ravine, including Ukrainian resisters, children, Orthodox priests, Roma, and notable individuals like Tatiana Markus, a Jewish member of the anti-Nazi underground in Kyiv. In an attempt to create some order on the site, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (BYHMC) was established in 2016, but this has not ended the conflicts.

These issues are extensively and dispassionately discussed in the second half of the book. Chapter 4 describes how antisemitism persisted in postwar Kyiv, graphically describing the experiences of the author’s family and providing a disturbing account of how the widespread hostility to Jews in the town was often encouraged by authorities. Chapter 5 examines the failure to establish a memorial on the site or to take criminal action in Germany against most of those responsible for the murders, while chapter 6 discusses how the situation changed with the protests of Nekrasov, Yevtushenko, and Kuznetsov and the eventual creation of a monument in the last years of Soviet rule. The final chapter is an extensive analysis of Babyn Yar commemoration in independent Ukraine and is particularly informative because of Dr. Khiterer’s involvement in this process. These efforts led to the establishment of the BYHMC which has already made considerable progress in advancing public understanding of the complex issues raised by the site despite substantial opposition. Its work has further been severely limited by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As Dr. Khiterer points out, “A bitter war of memory over the Babyn Yar site is continuing into the present day” (8). In her view, “The only way to satisfy people’s expectations is to incorporate their personal stories into one narrative about life and death in Kyiv during the Nazi occupation. I hope that the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Museum will fulfill this difficult task” (96).

The book is based on extensive research in four Ukrainian archives in Kyiv: the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Services of Ukraine, the Central State Archives of Public Organizations of Ukraine, the Central State Archive of the Highest Authorities of Ukraine, and the Central State CinePhotoPhono Archives of Ukraine as well as in the Yad Vashem Archive and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Israel and in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive in Washington, DC. The Russian archives are now closed, but the author has also consulted material from them that has been made available online. She also demonstrates a wide reading of the secondary literature in Russian, Ukrainian, and English.

Of the other books in English dealing with the topic, Ostap Kin’s edited volume Babyn Yar. Ukrainian Poets Respond (Cambridge, MA, 2023) is primarily about literary responses; Martin Dean’s Investigating Babyn Yar. Shadows from the Valley of Death (Lanham, MD, 2024) is, above all, concerned with documenting the process of mass murder, and the volume edited by Vladyslav Hrynevych and Paul Robert Magocsi, Babyn Yar. History and Memory (Kyiv, 2016) examines primarily memorialization.

This is thus the first book in English by a single author to deal with both the process of mass murder at Babyn Yar and the problems of memorialization. Its balanced tone in its treatment of these complex and sensitive subjects is greatly to be praised. Deeply moving and often shocking, the book not only illuminates the way the mass murder of the Jews was carried out in Soviet Ukraine but also sheds light on the complex questions of coming to terms in post-Soviet Ukraine with the issue of local collaboration in the Holocaust, an issue which is documented in detail by the author. She also provides poignant information about the minority Kyiv inhabitants who furnished assistance to their Jewish neighbors at the risk of their own lives, something which has sometimes been exaggerated for political reasons but also often largely forgotten. In both cases, collaboration and resistance, she documents how history was falsified under Soviet rule. It is essential reading for all those interested in the tragic fate of the Jews during World War II and the problems of how to establish a just and civil society and political order in Ukraine. I most strongly recommend it to all students of the Holocaust and ethnic conflict, the history of the Soviet Union and Ukraine, and the history of Jews in Eastern Europe. I also very much hope it will soon be published in Russian and Ukrainian.