From Erasure to Remembrance: Natan Sharansky on Babyn Yar and the Struggle over Historical Truth
Natan Sharansky said, 'For the Jewish youth who go today to Auschwitz, I hope they will also come to Babyn Yar. It is not less important to remember the Holocaust by bullets, the mass shootings of Jews in Eastern Europe.'
On the 84th anniversary of the massacre at Babyn Yar, researchers revealed the names of 1,031 previously unidentified victims, restoring their identities after decades of silence. The ceremony in Jerusalem, held amid war in Ukraine and intensifying disputes over Holocaust memory, brought together survivors, diplomats, and scholars.
Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv, became one of the largest killing sites of the Holocaust. On September 29–30, 1941, Nazi forces and their local collaborators murdered 33,771 Jews in just two days, lining them up at the edge of the ravine and shooting them in waves. In the following months, tens of thousands of Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and Ukrainian political prisoners were also executed there. The site stood as both a mass grave and a symbol of what historians call the “Holocaust by bullets,” where more than two million Jews in Eastern Europe were killed not in gas chambers but by gunfire.
Natan Sharansky leaned on a familiar lesson from his years as a Soviet dissident: in totalitarian regimes, history itself becomes a weapon. “In the Soviet Union, history was part of today’s politics. Encyclopedias were rewritten,” he told The Media Line. “What Putin did, he declared that Ukraine is not a nation. He turned them into the nation of Nazis.” For Sharansky, who endured years in Soviet prisons for refusing to forget his Jewish identity, the parallels are unmistakable. The Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, he argued, is fought not only with missiles but also with falsifications aimed at reshaping the past.
Each name represents a complete world, entire lives cut short. Every name we restore is dignity returned, identity reclaimed
That conviction framed the commemorations in Jerusalem, where names long lost to silence were spoken aloud for the first time. Some belonged to infants, one only three days old; another was a woman who had reached 104. The recitation restored what both Nazis and Soviets had tried to erase: individual identity. Revital Yakin Krakovsky of March of the Living told the audience, “Each name represents a complete world, entire lives cut short. Every name we restore is dignity returned, identity reclaimed.”
For Sharansky, this restoration is not a technical matter of archival work but a moral act rooted in Jewish tradition. “In Judaism, the value of one minute of life is the same as all the life,” he said. “The fact that they disappeared without a name, without somebody able to say the Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, about them, it’s breaking the chain of history of the Jewish people. That’s why I think it’s really a big mitzvah, a sacred commandment, to bring every name.”
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Using the Holocaust against Jews was not born today. A professor in Columbia University and some others, even 20 years ago, were saying that what Nazis did to Jews, that’s what Jews do today to Palestinians. That’s the highest moment of anti-Semitism.
The ceremony came at a time when accusations of genocide against Israel were being hurled from international podiums, including the United Nations General Assembly. Several leaders compared the war in Gaza to the Holocaust. Sharansky dismissed the analogy as a revival of an old tactic. “Using the Holocaust against Jews was not born today. A professor in Columbia University and some others, even 20 years ago, were saying that what Nazis did to Jews, that’s what Jews do today to Palestinians. That’s the highest moment of anti-Semitism. That’s exactly what anti-Semites all the time say. It’s not accidental that Nazis made Babi Yar on Yom Kippur. It’s not accidental that Kristallnacht was on Tisha B’Av. They’re taking our symbols and using them against us. After the Shoah, anti-Semitism was illegal. Today, they can take the Shoah and turn it against Jews.”
Natan Sharansky and Gabriel Colodro of The Media Line (The Media Line)
Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, added his own warning, reminding the audience that “the Shoah is the Shoah, the Nazis are the Nazis. Every attempt to attribute this title to others is, in my view, a desecration of the Holocaust.” His words emphasized the central tension of the event: to honor the murdered while resisting the ways in which their memory is appropriated for political ends.
The commemorations also highlighted that the fight for memory is inseparable from the physical danger facing archives in wartime. Sharansky noted, “In Kherson, when Russians left, they took archives. In Kyiv, in Kherson, in Odesa, archives were in real danger. But Ukraine’s government understood how important history is for today’s struggle. That’s why we succeeded to digitize millions of documents, even under fire.” The effort has already produced more than 20 million pages of Jewish history, stretching back to the 18th century.
Yevgen Korniychuk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel, framed the issue in terms of shared vulnerability. “We have been passing through the new era of the new Nazis that are currently attacking Ukraine. At the same time, Israel is experiencing the great pain of the war in Gaza,” he said, placing the memory of Babyn Yar alongside present-day violence.
Professor Dina Porat, chief historian of Yad Vashem, reminded the gathering of how the silence around Babyn Yar was first broken by Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem, which declared that there was “no monument, no marker.” She explained how Soviet authorities censored both the poem and Shostakovich’s symphony based on it, ensuring that the victims remained nameless in official memory. Only in 1991 was a monument finally allowed to mention Jewish victims explicitly. For Porat, the poem proved that words themselves can resist erasure.
I’d like to see Babyn Yar not simply as a museum… but a place for learning about ourselves
Sharansky insisted that Babyn Yar must now become not only a site of mourning but also a place of learning. “Physically, Babyn Yar was erased. They tried to turn it into a stadium. Symbolically, it was erased. The more we study, the more we learn, the more we understand how much we can get for our struggle today, for our resilience as people, for our insistence to survive and to continue. I’d like to see Babyn Yar not simply as a museum… but a place for learning about ourselves.”
His vision extends beyond the immediate conflict. As he told the Jerusalem audience, he hopes that by the 85th anniversary next year, both the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza will have ended, allowing the Babyn Yar site to develop into a world-class memorial and research center. “For the Jewish youth who go today to Auschwitz, I hope they will also come to Babyn Yar. It is not less important to remember the Holocaust by bullets, the mass shootings of Jews in Eastern Europe.”
The figure of Sharansky gave the proceedings a resonance that transcended ceremony. A man who once defied the Soviet empire in the name of Jewish identity now dedicates his energies to giving identity back to those whom Nazism and Stalinism conspired to erase. “Memory is a moral weapon against denial, oblivion, and distortion,” he told the audience. On this anniversary, as the names of the murdered were finally restored, his words carried the unmistakable ring of lived truth: history can be manipulated, archives can be threatened, symbols can be twisted—but names, once spoken, endure.
