Poems about Babi Yar commemorate the massacres committed by the Nazi Einsatzgruppe during World War II at Babi Yar, in a ravine located within the present-day Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. In just one of these atrocitiestaking place over September 29–30, 194133,771 Jewish men, women and children were killed in a single Einsatzgruppe operation. Background On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The German army crossed the 1939 former Polish-Soviet border soon thereafter and arrived in Kiev on September 19, 1941. Ten days later, following an explosion at the German army headquarters, Jews were rounded up, marched out of town, made to strip naked and massacred; they were stacked up, layer upon layer, at Babi Yar (literally, a "grandmother's ravine.") For decades after World War II, Soviet authorities were unwilling to acknowledge that the mass murder of Jews at Babi Yar was part of the Holocaust. The victims were generalized as Soviet; mention of their Jewish identity was impermissible, even though their deaths were every bit as much a consequence of the Nazi's genocidal Final Solution as the death camps of occupied Poland (Ehrenburg, Pravda 1944). There was, too, a virtual ban on mentioning the participation of the local police, or the role of the auxiliary battalions sent to Kiev by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) in rounding up, guarding and murdering their Jewish countrymen. In order to make the connection the Soviets worked so hard to suppress, Holocaust scholars have come to call events such as the massacres at Babi Yar "the Holocaust by bullet." By November 1941, the number of Jews shot dead at Babi Yar exceeded 75,000, according to an official report written by SS commander Paul Blobel. But Babi Yar remained the site of mass executions for two more years after the murder of most of Kiev's Jewish community in the fall of 1941. Later victims included prisoners of war, Soviet partisans, Ukrainian nationalists and Gypsies. Over 100,000 more people died there. The deaths of these non-Jewish victims facilitated the Soviet Union's postwar efforts to suppress recognition of Babi Yar's place in the history of the Holocaust, especially in the aftermath of the 1952 executions of prominent Jewish intellectuals dubbed the "Night of the Murdered Poets." Authors The atrocity was first remembered by the Jews of Kiev through a manuscript poem by Ilya Selvinsky, called I Saw It!. Even though