Foreword

Vitali Klitschko
Head of the Kyiv City State Administration

The creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center is one of my priority tasks as the mayor of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. We must decently commemorate and memorialize the victims of the terrifying tragedy that took place in our city, and which is well known around the world. Tens of thousands of people of different ethnicities were massacred during the occupation of Kyiv. And there is still no museum or memorial in our city that would tell about those tragic pages of our history. The Memorial Center is intended to tell about the terrifying events of September 1941, and memorialize every victim of the Babyn Yar tragedy. We must remember about these horrible crimes against humanity to prevent them from being repeated in the future.





Natan Sharansky
Chairman of the BYHMC Supervisory Board

The announcement of the architectural competition is a key moment in the development of our Memorial Center. Next year, the best architects of Ukraine and the whole world will submit their ideas for building the Center, and will compete for the right to contribute to the restoration of historical justice. For almost 80 years, there has been no decent memorial on the site of the atrocious crime against humanity in Babyn Yar. There were dozens of reasons for that, but now, the situation is changing radically. And this is a symbolic step that the global Jewish community, Ukrainian society and all people of good will have been waiting for, regardless of where they live. We realize that there is much work still ahead, but the solid foundation has already been set.