04 April 2025

Behind every name is a person: piecing together the stories of Babyn Yar

Through careful archival work and family testimony, researchers in Ukraine are uncovering the stories of those killed at Babyn Yar.

Viktor Zinkevych didn’t know that his mother had died at Babyn Yar, or even that he was Jewish, until he was 12 years old. When the Nazis invaded Kyiv, he was only a baby. His mother, Yevheniia Leibovna Pechenyk, was taken away after being identified as Jewish by their neighbors. Luckily, Viktor’s grandmother was able to hide him, and he survived.

His father remarried after the war, and he grew up not knowing about his real mother. It was only when he joined a new school, which required his family to share his birth certificate with his mother’s name on it, that other children teased him for being Jewish. He asked his father to explain, and finally, the truth came out. 

Yevheniia Leibovna Pechenyk, Viktor's mother, who was murdered at Babyn Yar.

Yevheniia was one of approximately 33, 771 people who were murdered in and around the ravine known as Babyn Yar over two days in September 1941. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Kyiv was killed, and their remains left in a mass grave just around the corner from where they had lived.

In contrast to the Nazi’s typical record-keeping, many of the victims were not even registered first. This is one reason many of the victims are not known. But as a site of massacre, there are layers obscuring the stories of the people who were murdered there: layers of history, of geography, and of bureaucracy.  

Sometimes, as in Viktor’s story, the truth is so hidden that the families of the victims themselves struggle to find out what happened.  

Restoring memory through archives and testimony

The “Names” project by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Ukraine is trying to change this. An IHRA grant recipient, they are seeking Holocaust survivors and their descendants to restore the stories of people who were killed in the largest single massacre perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in Eastern Europe.

Last year, they uncovered 200 new names of individuals who were victims of mass executions at Babyn Yar, previously unlisted in any records of the deceased, and added over 100 of their photographs. The Memorial Center has compiled the most comprehensive database to date, containing 29,551 victim names. 

 

Digitizing the past amid conflict

Working with original documents during a war is far from simple. Inna Kalenska, project curator, tells us about some of the challenges faced by the project team: “For the first year of the full-scale invasion, it was the darkest time and the most difficult time for us, for our organization, but we try to stay committed to our mission.”  

One of their most crucial efforts is digitizing documents, especially those in high-conflict zones. 60% of the state archives of Kharkiv were destroyed by Russian troops, she says, and many other archival institutions were damaged. Thanks to its partnership with the State Archival Service of Ukraine, the Memorial Center has been able to digitize over 5 million historical documents from various regions across the country since the full-scale invasion began. Today, the online archive contains more than 7 million documents from 18 archival institutions, and continues to expand.  

“Time is also our enemy,” says Inna. Even in times of peace, these physical documents are fragile and vulnerable, and each human touch represents a risk of damage. But these objects are all that we have left of the victims and survivors when the last of the eyewitnesses leave us.

This is why digitizing goes hand-in-hand with restoring the names of the victims — by safeguarding the documents, we are safeguarding the stories.  

 

Workshop on archival methodologies in Ukraine

As part of the IHRA Grant, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center also held a two-day workshop on archival research, including techniques for analyzing historical documents, digitizing archival materials, and effectively documenting findings. The workshop was attended by students, fellows, Ph.D. candidates, and researchers interested in Holocaust studies.

This work is painstaking and slow-going. Sometimes it involves conducting new interviews and gathering original testimony, like the interview with Viktor Zinkevych conducted earlier in 2025. More often, it is a careful process of checking and cross-referencing documents from a disparate range of sources to put together a fuller picture of the victims.

It’s not only about new names. Every tiny piece of information can contribute to the story of a person’s life.  

Inna says one of the stories that sticks with her is a couple with a 4-year-old daughter, Tanya, who upon hearing that they were being sent to Babyn Yar, decided to take poison rather than obey the orders.  “I can’t forget it and get it out of my head,” she says. “Just the impossible position this family found themselves in, this heartbreaking choice they had to make. And in the end to say ‘No, I would rather kill myself than some stranger does that.’” 

“Just the impossible position this family found themselves in, this heartbreaking choice they had to make."

The people behind the names

Other stories are poignant in different ways. David Khayimovich Krupnik, a carpenter who had fought and lost two fingers in World War I, had survived several pogroms in his life. Once, he had been saved by the intervention of a German officer who lived in his building. When the Nazis captured Kyiv in 1941, he did not believe that they were capable of mass killings.

David refused to leave his home when evacuation orders were declared. He was killed at Babyn Yar.

David Khayimovich Krupnik

David Khayimovich Krupnik was a carpenter. He was known to be tall and strong, with a beautiful singing voice.

Some of the stories that have become clearer through the work of the Names project are people like Rivka Babushkina. She lived with her husband Issac and his orphaned niece, Khaya, who they were raising as their own. Issac’s sisters, Liza and Tsilya, had come to Kyiv from Belarus with their brother. Tsilya was evacuated when the Nazis occupied Kyiv, leaving her 14-year-old daughter Ilya with her sister Liza.

On the morning that Jews were marched to Babyn Yar, Ilya insisted that she was Austrian (since her father was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and refused to go. Aunt Liza, deeply upset, threw the house keys to Ilya and said, “Do whatever you want.” Ilya returned home alone.

After the war, she was reunited with her mother Tsilya, who also survived. Rivka and the rest of the family were murdered at Babyn Yar.  

Rivka Babushkina and her family were murdered in Babyn Yar.

Why do these stories matter? What is the point of this work? Inna says, “It’s about some universal values, I think, because behind every name is a person and a story. It was a life that was lost, and it’s about the people — the adults, the elderly people and the children — who loved, who dreamed, who planned something for the future, but their lives were taken by the Nazis. And personally, for me, restoring their names is not just historical research, it’s our way of bringing these names out of oblivion and honoring their memory, to ensure that their stories continue to speak to us.” 

 Babyn Yar is one of the most significant memorial sites in Ukraine. When world leaders and renowned artists visit, they often pledge to preserve the memory of the past, sharing a vision of the big picture. But the big picture is woven together with many strands, each created by the often-invisible work of individual archivists, historians and workers.

Painstaking and slow, this work is what sustains Holocaust memory — not only public remembrance, but the quiet reconstruction of stories once thought forgotten.

The IHRA Grant Program funds projects working in the field of Holocaust education, remembrance and research every year. Stay up to date with our newsletter and social media channels for details about the 2025 call. 

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