“It Was Impossible To Be Saved If No One Would Save You” – Witness To The Babyn Yar Massacre

Oleksandr Sklianskyi was a young Jewish boy in Kyiv when Nazi German occupiers shot to death 34,000 Kyivan Jews at the Babyn Yar ravine on September 28-29,1941. An estimated 100,000 victims perished during the next two years of German occupation.

Building owners received an order from the Ukrainian Kyiv Police to give up “all Jews, NKVD officers, and members of the All-Union Bolshevik Communist Party,” by midnight.

Those who concealed these people were threatened with the death penalty.

Sklianskyi remembers walking with his brother and his mother when a family friend, Tamara, stopped them in the road:  “You are taking your children and yourself to a massacre,” she warned.

“For three weeks, Kyiv was filled with this terrible ash of the victims of Babyn Yar,” recalls Skylianskyi.

“We were lucky,” says Skylianskyi, “she picked us out from a crowd.”

Watch Oleksandr Sklianskyi, a witness to the Babyn Yar Massacre recount his story.