There weren’t supposed to be any Jews left in Dnipro.
Not after Bohdan Khmelnytsky rallied the Cossacks 350 years ago to rise up against Poland and, along the way, to massacre the Jews. Ukrainians still celebrate him as a liberator and folk hero, displaying his statue in public squares and his picture on vodka bottles. Russians toast him for reuniting Ukraine with Mother Russia. But what Jews in that part of the world remember are stories of how “Khmel the Wicked” burned, beheaded or strangled their ancestors, denouncing them as footmen of Polish nobility. And how he burned their synagogues, except the holy Torahs, which his soldiers laid out in the streets to be trampled.
Adolf Hitler brought more advanced appliances of extermination to Dnipro, an isolated city of 1 million southeast of Kyiv. In October 1941, during the harvest festival of Sukkot, Nazi troops and Ukrainian police marched 11,000 Jews to a ravine on what is now the campus of the Dnipropetrovsk State University of Internal Affairs, then mowed them down with machine guns. A band played throughout to mask the screams. All told, 20,000 Jews were executed in the city during World War II.
