Unimaginable

This is from a series of photographs taken in January 2020 at Babyn Yar in Kyiv. To all intents and purposes it appears as a city park on the edge of Kyiv. Locals walk their dogs and surrounded by apartments and save a coarse statue and recent memorial the memory of what happened here has been largely covered by both man and nature. Just over 80 years ago in September 1941 German army forces massacred 34,000 Jews in two days in what was later seen as a precursor to the final solution. The victims, men women and children, stripped naked and shot laying layer upon layer of bodies. Babyn Yar was chosen as it was a natural ravine where the people could be easily herded, executed and buried. The site was later used for further executions of prisoners of war. As if this unimaginable horror was not enough in 1943 in their hasty retreat and to coverup their actions, the Germans had prisoners exhume the bodies and incinerate them, spreading the ashes in nearby forests. The low winter light accentuates the bleakness of the place. The ravine has been covered over and the park appears to be landscaped to suggest the shape of the ravine.