The Memorials At Babi Yar

Babi Yar is a ravine in suburban Kiev, infamous for being the site of one of the largest Jewish massacres during the Holocaust. From September 29 to 30, 1941, 33,771 Jews were led to the ravine and shot to death. During the overall German occupation, it's estimated that 100,000 to 150,000 Jews, Russians and other people labeled undesirable by the Germans were killed at Babi Yar.

The Soviets refused to allow a memorial specifically to the murdered Jews. Instead, in 1976, they erected a memorial to all the Soviet people killed.

Another view and a look at the surrounding moat. Which is not the actual ravine where the Jews perished. History adjusted as needed.

Today, Babi Yar is part of a larger park.

Other memorials have been added. To Ukrainian Nationalists and for children killed.

Monument to Tatiana Markus, a Ukrainian tortured by the Gestapo in 1943.

Old Lithuanian Jewish Cemetery

There's old and then there's old. In Lithuania, you can find big cemeteries going back past centuries. Or Holocaust related burial sites.

In the small town of Varniai, down a dirt road and into a field, there's a small Jewish cemetery. It's interesting because the cemetery was abandoned years before WWII and the Holocaust. It's an example of true historical evidence that Jews lived in Lithuania centuries ago.

The cemetery.

Markings are all in Hebrew. Graves are heavily worn, some almost swallowed by evolving nature.

Jewish Mass Graves In Alytus, Lithuania

Another small town in Lithuania, another Jewish mass grave on the outskirts. In the case of Alytus, the Germans showed up, had Russian prisoners head to the Vidzgris forest outside of town and dig large pits. Initially, a thousand or so Jews were killed. By the end of World War II, tens of thousands of Jews from Lithuania, Russia and Eastern Europe were murdered and buried in the forest.

The forest today.

Two monuments by the road.

A torn Star of David was erected in 1993 up on a hill overlooking the mass grave pits.

Concrete caps with pyramids mark the sites of the mass graves.

Back toward town, a closed Synagogue still stands.

The ruined interior of the synagogue.