Dina Pronicheva was an actress in the Kyiv puppet theatre, and she went to the ravine because her parents had gone. The notices pasted up around the city told Jewish residents to report with their documents, money, valuables and warm clothing. Warm clothing — people read that and thought it meant a journey, a resettlement somewhere east. Most of those who came were women, children and the old; the men of military age were mostly gone with the army.
Over the twenty-ninth and the thirtieth of September, 1941, German forces and local collaborators shot 33,771 people there. Pronicheva survived by falling before she was shot and climbing out of the ravine in the dark, and she gave evidence afterwards. Only a handful of others lived to say what they had seen. Almost everything we know of those two days, we know from them.
The argument over how to mark the ravine ran for decades. The monument the Soviet authorities finally put up in 1976 spoke of citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of war; the word Jewish does not appear on it. A menorah was placed there in 1991.
Yevtushenko wrote his poem about the ravine in 1961, twenty years after, and it opens by saying there is no monument there. Shostakovich set it the following year as the first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony, for bass and men's chorus, so the words were carried further than the page could have taken them.