In The Jews of Silence, Elie Wiesel writes that there is only one reason why a Jew travels to Kiev. That is to see Babi Yar. So it was for me when a few years ago, I returned to Kiev, thirty years after my family had sur­rendered their Soviet passports, became stateless, emerged through the gauntlet of abuse and ritual humi­li­ation that applying to abandon the Soviet Union entailed, and quit that place forever. My family had lived and toiled and fallen in defence of that soil for as many gen­er­a­tions as we can trace. Yet the material aggregate of our family history was a few canvas bags crammed with photo albums and the neces­sit­ies that my parents and grand­par­ents assumed could not be obtained outside the Soviet sphere, ceramic con­tain­ers adorned with little moles and hedgehogs and a couple of Zenit wrist­watches that could be pawned if cir­cum­stances neces­sit­ated.

When I landed back in Kiev, after suc­cess­fully making it through passport control without being denounced as a rootless cos­mo­pol­it­an or inter­rog­ated as a Zionist agitator (the clerk was in fact genial bordering on flir­ta­tious), I felt a great anxiety to get to Babi Yar imme­di­ately as if to see a frail relative for whom time was limited. Kiev is a glorious city, par­tic­u­larly in late September when I arrived. The weather is still mild, the air is sharp and filled with the smell of chestnuts that leaves you heady, the food is sen­sa­tion­al, the sites are powerful and evocative. But none of this inter­ested me. Not even the black caviar in the Bessar­a­bi­an Market or the statue of Bulgakov and the debauched feline from The Master and Margarita, at his feet. All I wanted was to be at the killing field known as Babi Yar.

Just a few years ago, the story of what happened in that place, was virtually unknown, except by scholars and deep readers of the Holocaust. But every Jew from the Soviet Union knows the words “Babi Yar” and is imme­di­ately frozen into panic by them. Babi Yar stands for the cul­min­a­tion of centuries of degrading the Jew in the eyes of the wider pop­u­la­tion. The church, the Tsars, the intel­li­gent­sia, the pro­pa­ganda of the Communist Party and the lionised nation­al­ist butchers like Bogdan Chmel­nit­sky all bear respons­ib­il­ity for this.

When I travelled to Babi Yar, it was in part an act of com­mem­or­a­tion to honour the memories of our sacred dead across Europe. To remember the lives of the Jews of Kiev, people indis­tin­guish­able from me in appear­ance, in native tongue, in cuisine, and to con­tem­plate by what chance my family had the fortune to be evacuated a few weeks before the city fell, a turn of fate through which I was born, and 33,771 wretched souls went to that ravine in late September 1941 joined by tens of thousands more over the remainder of the war.

I also came in hope of grasping how the events that happened there could occur. How it could be that within days of the with­draw­al of the Red Army from the city, a peaceful, well-integ­rated civilian community could simply be plucked from their ordinary lives and led to that ravine, looted, stripped naked and murdered in their tens of thousands. How could their Ukrainian neigh­bours line the streets to watch the spectacle of howling Jewish children being taken to die, of old women carrying their bundles to nowhere, while the unceasing staccato of gunfire played the beat of their slow death march? How could they have cheered and taunted, helped them­selves to the pos­ses­sions of people among whom they had lived for gen­er­a­tions, and deposited more tip-offs to the Germans about hiding Jews than the Nazis could process? And how could these scenes be repeated, day after day, in towns and cities and villages across thousands of miles of Soviet territory?

How was it that a force of 3,000 killers of the Ein­satz­grup­pen could be allowed to carry out the murders of 1.5 million people in a land they did not know? How could it pass that the well-educated, cultured men that filled the ranks of the killing squads could perform their work of hunting and ter­min­at­ing every single Jew, not only with a deathly effi­ciency but with an unmis­tak­able sadism?

What cowardice, what malice, what mania lurks within ordinary men and women that such crimes, rendered on the weak and defence­less, could occur?

It was my vain attempt to gain some insight into these questions that had drawn me to Kiev. And I left no closer to under­stand­ing. Only with a fear that everything we think we know about one another, the ration­al­ism and under­ly­ing goodness that we claim for ourselves and thus impute to others, is a mirage. That all it takes is upheaval, the erosion of order and the emergence of oppor­tun­ity for aspects of humanity that we pretend don’t exist, to overwhelm everything.

I nev­er­the­less returned home with a renewed determ­in­a­tion to ensure that what happened to the Jews of the Soviet Union during the Holocaust, the iden­tit­ies of their killers, the depravity of their methods and the stories of their victims should be known to every Jew. I am not alone in this under­tak­ing. Over the past few years, articles have been published in journals and news­pa­pers, com­mem­or­a­tion cere­mon­ies have been held, a monument was unveiled in Sydney, and a spec­tac­u­lar pro­duc­tion of Shostakovich’s Babi Yar Symphony was staged in Melbourne. The decision by the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies to focus this year’s Yom HaShoah event on the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union will mean a great deal to every Aus­trali­an Jew of Soviet descent. More than that, it will mean that through these acts of remem­brance and education, in some small way, we have thwarted the killers who sought to oblit­er­ate not only Jewish life but any memory that our people ever lived and died.

Alex Ryvchin is the Co-CEO of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry and the author of Zionism – The Concise History. He will be deliv­er­ing the keynote address at the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies Yom HaShoah com­mem­or­a­tion on April 7.