Nearly 80 years after the Babyn Yar massacre, Ukrainian researchers lift victims out of anonymity

(JTA) — For most of his life, all the information Igor Kulakov had about his paternal great-grandparents was their picture, their names and the fact that they had been murdered during the Holocaust.

The assumption in his family had always been that Sheindle and Mordechai Sova were shot at Babyn Yar (often spelled “Babi Yar”), a ravine on Kyiv’s outskirts where German troops massacred at least 33,000 Jews in September 1941, in one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust.

But beyond that, he was unable to unearth any further details, even after attempting to research the subject in the Kyiv city archives. As he grew older, the uncertainty began to have a psychological effect on him.