Katarina Schaupp-Karmann, Head of the Department of Culture, Education and National Minorities of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Ukraine, visited the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI) on July 7 to discuss aspects of University’s participation in the project entitled “80 Stumbling Stones for the 80th Anniversary of Baby Yar Tragedy”.
In particular, participants in the meeting outlined a scenario for the ceremony of installing the “stumbling block” on the University campus on October 8, 2021. Plans are in hand to install the memorial to Georgii Briff, Igor Sikorsky KPI employee who was killed in Baby Yar during World War II. By way of example, Katarina Schaupp-Karmann handed Sergii Sidorenko, KPI Vice-Rector for International Relations, photos of the memorial plaques that have already been installed in the cities of Rivne and Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi.
The FRG Embassy conceived this project in partnership with the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, which is timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Baby Yar tragedy. Importantly, the project is supported by the Kyiv City Council in cooperation with the Stolpersteine (German: “stumbling stone” or “stumbling block”) Foundation and German artist Gunter Demnig.
It is worth noting that Baby Yar is the large ravine in Kyiv, the site of a mass grave of some 100,000 people killed by German Nazi SS squads between 1941 and 1943.
Most of the victims were Jews, but some were communist officials and Soviet prisoners of war. After the initial massacre of Jews, Baby Yar remained in use as an execution site for Soviet prisoners of war and for Roma (Gypsies) as well as for Jews. It became the symbol of the first stage of killing during the Holocaust and of the massacres by the Einsatzgruppen (German: “deployment groups”) – the mobile killing units. The site came to world attention after the 1961 publication of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Baby Yar. A small obelisk and memorial were erected in the 1960s and 1970s.