The notices went up on walls around Kyiv in September 1941, telling Jewish residents to appear with documents, money and warm clothing; most who read them believed they were being resettled, and they walked to the ravine at Babyn Yar carrying what they could. In two days 33,771 people were murdered there, and thousands more in the months that followed. The number is known because someone wrote it down, and because neighbours who survived the occupation kept the count and the names as best they could.
The monument put up on the site in 1976 called the dead citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of war; the word Jews wasn't on it. That wording stood until 1991, when a separate memorial finally named who had been killed there.
Yevtushenko's poem came in 1961, and for years it was printed with lines softened; Kuznetsov wrote his Babi Yar as a boy who had lived beside the ravine, and the Soviet edition of 1966 lost great stretches of it. He kept the cut pages hidden, and published the full text only after he left the country.