![]() The research and design team also had access to snapshots taken by a Nazi photographer immediately after the massacre. The images showed the original network of ravines as well as five cemeteries, including a Jewish one, which existed on the site before the Nazi invasion. To recreate the ravine as it looked 80 years ago, artists, architects and historians studied geological and aerial surveys carried out before the war by czarist and then Soviet authorities, plus all available historical maps, some dating to the 19th century. (As many as 70,000 more people, including other Jews, Soviet POWs and Roma civilians, are believed to have been murdered in the ravine in the two years that followed.) Remarkably, until now, the massacre of Kyiv’s Jews has never been properly memorialized. The atrocity, carried out by an SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing unit, Nazi police and several dozen Ukrainian collaborators, was by many accounts the single deadliest mass killing of Jews during the Holocaust. Here a series of miniature dioramas, built to scale and making use of plasma screens and virtual reality displays, will bring to life an unfathomable horror: the murder of 33,771 men, women and children-a huge portion of Kyiv’s remaining Jewish population-at the ravine on September 29 and 30, 1941. Then they will descend ten feet into an artificial canyon illuminated by a skylight. When it’s completed, Shovenko tells me, visitors will enter the roughly 260-foot-long tumulus through one of two portals. This half-finished art installation is called the “kurgan,” a word for a type of prehistoric burial mound found in Ukraine and Russia. In a forested park on the western edge of Kyiv, Ukraine, near the ravine known as Babyn Yar, Oleh Shovenko leads me to a 20-foot-tall steel frame that looms over a weed-choked field.
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