Anna Tsesarsky fled the Nazis in 1941 with her mother and sister, leaving her father and 15-year-old brother in Kiev two months before the Nazis occupied the Ukrainian city and began a massacre at a place called Babi Yar.
The Nazis occupied Kiev on Sept. 19, and within two weeks, Tsesarsky’s father, and brother, were dead, two of the almost 34,000 Jewish victims murdered at the ravine, machine-gunned during two days.
The Germans murdered thousands more Jews, Soviet officials, Gypsies and Russian prisoners of war at the ravine between 1941 and 1943, bringing the total killed there to almost 200,000.
On Sunday, Tsesarsky, now 88, was among those who gathered in Denver’s Babi Yar Memorial Park to remember the dead 75 years after the slaughter.
“I was 13 years old when the war started. Me, my sister and mother were able to escape,” she said.
The Soviet government had mobilized the men of Kiev, including her father, to fight. They weren’t allowed to leave during the evacuation that ended for Tsesarsky when she, her mother and 18-year-old sister, arrived in Kazakhstan.
Her brother wouldn’t leave his father’s side.
“I live in this tragedy,” she said, tapping her breast.
Speakers at the annual event discussed the dangers that antisemitism and authoritarianism still pose throughout the world.
Few people believed that the Nazis would try to exterminate Europe’s Jews during the early days of Hitler’s reign, Jonathan Adleman, a professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, told the crowd.
Today, Iranian leaders call for the elimination of Israel, jihadists target Jews and others in Isreal, and elsewhere, and antisemitism is on the rise throughout the world, Adleman said.
Israel and Jews throughout the world must remain vigilant and strong, he said. “We have to remain strong, not to conquer other countries, but to protect ourselves.”
The Nazis wanted to destroy “not only Jews but the essence of Jewry, the soul of Jewry,” said Rabbi Aharon Sirota of the Western Center for Russian Jewry.
“The main lessons we have to learn are tragic lessons,” Adleman said.
Tsesarsky was involved in the planning of the 27-acre memorial park, which was completed in 1982, according to her granddaughter, Jessica Milstein, a Holocaust education advocate.
The Jewish community also welcomed a new Torah scroll at the annual memorial, which was hosted by the Mizel Museum. The scroll was carried in a small procession through the crowd after an expert ritual scribe inked the final letters.
The Torah scroll is composed of 62 to 84 sheets of parchment that are prepared according to exact specifications and contain exactly 304,805 letters.
