They brought there bodies of people shot dead by the NKVD – mercilessly, with malice and immutable orderliness. They did it daily. Dozens, hundreds of bodies every day. They were secretly buried in the woods. Historians still can agree only on a very rough estimate of the number of victims. They say that about 100,000 people were killed here, including Ukrainians, Poles (at least 1,000 of them), Russians, Jews, Belarusians... Civilians and soldiers, intellectuals, workers, peasants... Their only “crime” was to have been condemned to death in 1937-40 by the terrorist totalitarian regime of the USSR.
According to a presidential decree issued by Viktor Yushchenko in 2007, the third Sunday of May is marked as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. The Bykivnia Forest near Kyiv will forever remain a grim symbol of the atrocities committed by the Stalinist regime. The tragedy of Bykivnia (of about 100,000 secret burials, the scholars have been able to identify 14,200 victims by name, but the work continues) is, and will always stand side-by-side with such inexcusable crimes against humanity as Auschwitz, Babyn Yar, Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and the Katyn massacre. The Soviet government created three “impartial” government commissions to investigate the crime (in 1945, 1971, and 1987) and, of course (how could it be otherwise?), all the commissions reached the “unbiased” conclusion that these executions were “the handiwork of the Nazi invaders” (and the 1987 investigation destroyed many documents that were directly relevant to the case). But the truth always prevails in the end, and the real perpetrators of the murders of those who were buried in secret in Bykivnia are now known to Ukraine and the world. Vasyl Symonenko and Alla Horska gave their lives to make it happen...
Photo by Ruslan KANIUKA, The Day
Such pain can never end. Such a day cannot be an ordinary occasion. Speaking at a memorial meeting in Bykivnia, President Petro Poroshenko said, in particular: “The Bykivnia Forest is not the only place in Ukraine where the regime’s henchmen met and surpassed their so-called ‘quotas’ for the mass destruction of people... But it is probably the largest mass grave in Ukraine where tens upon tens of thousands of innocent victims found their last resting-places. The NKVD brought their victims’ bodies here by a truckload, and sometimes by a truck convoy.”
These were terrible and very fitting words. For Den/The Day, it is crucial (as we have repeatedly talked about this extraordinary man for years) that the president mentioned in his speech Yevhen Hrytsiak – a Ukrainian, a fighter, a humanist, a free man. This is what Poroshenko said: “Yevhen Hrytsiak of blessed memory just recently passed away. He was one of the legendary leaders of the Norilsk Uprising in Gulag camps which political prisoners launched shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin. His virtuous life shows that the Ukrainians have always had among themselves heroes capable of resisting even the most violent dictatorship.” And then the president quoted a passage from Hrytsiak’s memoirs: “When the NKVD troops stormed the camp areas that had come under the prisoners’ control, the soldiers and officers poured lead into the rebels with assault rifles and machine guns; the Ukrainian patriots fought back with stones. And when they finally ran out of stones, they sang their anthem Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished.”
Let us continue the head of state’s line of thought as follows: it is people like Hrytsiak who will always be the most reliable guarantee that totalitarian crimes like that committed in Bykivnia will never be repeated. Also, if the president has publicly stressed that Hrytsiak was a Ukrainian hero, should not he confirm it officially by a decree?
