The site of the Babyn Yar genocide is to be used to build a hotel for Euro 2012. The plan exposes the dark side of Ukraine.
Probably few people in this country have heard of Babi Yar, but if recent proposals by the Kiev city authority go ahead, England soccer fans travelling to the 2012 European Championships to be held in Ukraine may well find themselves staying in a hotel built at the site of one of the most notorious massacres of the second world war.
Between 29 and 30 September 1941, German SS troops assisted by local auxiliaries killed more than 33,000 of Kiev’s Jewish inhabitants at a ravine that ran through parkland on the city’s periphery. It was the culmination of a genocidal sweep through Ukraine that wiped out one community after another. Eventually, about 700,000 Ukrainian Jews would perish at the hands of the Germans, their Romanian allies, and Ukrainians recruited into police battalions. Thousands of Gypsies were also murdered throughout Ukraine, many at the ravine that became a favourite murder site until the city was liberated.
