In his flat in one of Kiev’s Soviet-era apartment blocks, Mikhail Frenkel reminisces about Dina Pronicheva, the aunt on his mother’s side with the beautiful face and sad eyes. She was, he tells the JC, the glamorous one in the family, an actress in a theatre troupe during Stalin’s time.
Yet her greatest performance did not take place on the stage, but at the bottom of a muddy ravine on Kiev’s outskirts during Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine.
That was when Nazi death squads carried out a massacre of nearly 34,000 Jews over the last two days of September 1941, leaving the ravine carpeted with corpses. Aunt Dina’s acting skills saved her life that day, says Mikhail. Her role? Lying amid the bodies and pretending to be already dead.
“The troops were pushing people to the edge of the ravine and then shooting them, but my aunt Dina told me that she jumped before she was shot,” he recalls. “She fell about five or six metres, and landed amid people who had already been killed. She could hear German soldiers walking around checking that everyone was dead. Luckily, the German officer who looked at her did not want to waste bullets, so in order to tell if she was dead, he simply stood on her hand very hard. Despite the pain, she managed to lie still – because she was an actress, I think she knew how to play dead convincingly.”
Dina, then 30, was one of only 29 survivors of the massacre, which took place at the spot known as Babyn Yar, “or Grandmother’s Ravine”.
Five years later, in 1946, her stage skills were on show again, when she retold her ordeal in calm, measured tones to a packed courtroom in Kiev, where several of the accused were on trial.
Footage of “evidentiary session 1679” — titled “On the atrocities committed by Fascist invaders” — shows the assembled dignitaries looking both spellbound and horrified.
This week, in the wake of the Babyn Yar massacre’s 80th anniversary, those dreadful days are once again being mulled over, as Kiev hosts a series of high-profile commemoration events.
On Wednesday, presidents Isaac Herzog of Israel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany joined their Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, at a ceremony at the site, where a new museum and memorial complex is due for completion in 2026.
The commemorations are seen as a long-overdue acknowledgement of the horrors of Babyn Yar, now often dubbed the “Holocaust by bullets”. Such was the scale of the slaughter here that it disturbed even the perpetrators — who, as they traipsed across mounds of bodies checking that all were dead, were confronted directly with their own handiwork. Babyn Yar paved the way directly for Hitler’s death camps — a more “industrialised” way of killing, where the victims could be murdered more quickly, and the culprits could look the other way more easily.
Yet for decades, this grim milestone on the route to the Final Solution was all but forgotten. In communist times, officials built a park over much of Babyn Yar, with discussion of the massacre discouraged. And today, the massacre remains little known internationally compared to the camps of Auschwitz or Belsen.
Even Mikhail, now 73, could barely believe it when, as a young man, he first heard his aunt tell the full story. It began one sunny September morning after menacing leaflets appeared round Kiev.
“Kikes of the city of Kiev!” the leaflet read. “On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 7:00 A.M. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables and warm clothing at Dorogozhitshaya Street.... Failure to appear is punishable by death.”
Despite the abusive tone, many Jewish families turned up to the rendezvous point, thinking that because it was near a railway station, they were going to be sent to Palestine. Dina, however, had a “bad feeling”, and before leaving, took her two children – Lida five, and Vlodya, three – to her Russian mother-in-law’s home.
By the time she neared Babyn Yar with her sister and parents, lines of Nazis and Ukrainian auxiliary police were beating them with knuckledusters and chains. Screams could be heard from those further ahead, who could see how the ravine was now a giant, ready-dug grave.
For Dina’s sister and parents, there was no escape. Dina, however, gained a brief stay of execution by showing the guards her actor’s union card, which had her husband’s Russian surname.
“She told them that she was not Jewish, and was sent to an office with other people who had been told they would be released,” Mikhail told the JC. “They waited for several hours, but then a Nazi appeared. He said: ‘Shoot them anyway. If we release them now, they will tell people what is happening here, and then no more Jews will come to us.’”
By the time Dina neared the ravine, it was too dark for the troops to see properly. She fell more out of sheer fear than anything else, landing amid other corpses and losing all sense of whether she was still alive. Only when other bodies tumbled on top of her, some still convulsing, did she realise that she was unhurt.
In her 1946 testimony, she described how Germans troops wandered round, finishing off the wounded before covering them with soil.
“They decided to check me,” she said. “They stood on my chest and one arm. There were nails on the soles of their boosts. They twisted my arm, I felt that this was the end. I didn’t make any noise.”
Satisfied she was dead, they then covered her in earth, leaving her suffocating. She began digging herself out, deciding it was “better to be shot than be buried alive”, but by the time she did so, the troops had moved on.
Stumbling around among the dead, she paused to rescue an 11-year-old boy called Fima, who, like her, was unhurt.
As they finally clambered out, a shot rang out in the darkness and he fell. “I caressed the boy’s cold face, bidding him farewell, then I stood up and started to run,” she said.
Those were just the first times Dina cheated death, according to Mikhail. In the weeks afterwards, she was arrested at least twice; the first time she escaped by leaping from the back of a moving police truck, the second time a Ukrainian policeman took pity on her and freed her. Then, when she tried to visit her children at her mother-in-law’s, a cleaner in the block called the police, who took her son Vlodya hostage, threatening to kill him unless Dina handed herself in. When the police then called for the “soul destroyer” — a van equipped with a gas chamber — a friendly neighbour bribed a policeman to let Vlodya go.
“I am a grown man now, and Dina’s story still gives me goosebumps when I think about it,” said Mikhail, who has spent his working life as a journalist. “It is amazing how lucky she was. If she had lived in [western] Europe, she’d be as famous as Anne Frank.” It is thought that up to 200,000 people may have died at Babyn Yar, with Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and the mentally ill also executed there in the following months. However, when Ukraine’s Soviet rulers finally erected a monument there in 1976, it made no mention of the Holocaust, and spoke only of the killing of “Soviet citizens”. To have done otherwise would have contravened the Soviet doctrine that all ethnicities suffered equally under Nazism.
“We grew up with nobody talking about it all, we didn’t even talk about the Holocaust with the six million,” said Mikhail. He added Dina, who died the year after the monument went up, was sad that it made no mention of how Jews were lured there.
“She was glad it was commemorated, but disappointed that it did not talk about the Jewish suffering.”
Attitudes changed after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, when Ukraine’s newly independent government ordered the identity of the victims to be recorded on the Babyn Yar monument. As hostilities with Moscow have increased in recent years, Ukrainian leaders have also given enthusiastic backing to the memorial project. Transparency about the past, they argue, is one thing that now distinguishes their country from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
As with many memorials to tragedies, the one at Babyn Yar has been embroiled in controversy. The construction is part funded by Russian Jewish philanthropists, prompting concerns — dismissed by the centre’s staff — that Moscow is trying to influence the project.
Most of Babyn Yar is also still part of a public park that was built over the site in Soviet times: some visitors find it disturbing that the museum will exist in a spot where people still come to picnic and drink. But with only a few of the original survivors now still alive worldwide — most now too frail to speak publicly — few disagree on the need for a significant site of remembrance. Even that, though, will only be of limited succour to Mr Frenkel, whose heart always turns melancholy when he visits Babyn Yar.
“I never attend the official commemorations, but I do go there alone sometimes,” he says. “It makes me think not just about what happened at Babyn Yar, but of all the awful things that have happened to us Jews over the centuries.”
