As the evening light falls over the gentle slope of the ravine, Natalia Yefimushkina, her head tightly bound in a red scarf, stares into the heart of one of Russia's largest mass graves.
In the summer of 1942, the Nazi death squads first came to Rostov-on-Don, a city about 1,000 kilometres south of Moscow. Over the next year and half, they would kill 27,000 people here, most of them Jews like Yefimushkina's grandparents. They were ordered to strip and line up along the ravine before soldiers opened fire and executed them in what has been called a "Holocaust of bullets."
Yefimushkina is so traumatized by the stories of what happened here that she is haunted by visions of her family members.
"Up there on the top, they were standing. They were speaking in German, there were dogs, and [people were] crying — and I'm standing over there. It's as if I'm there, too, with them," Yefimushkina said, crying herself.
"I'm standing here as if my grandparents see me. I can feel them … do you understand?" Yefimushkina said. "I can feel them."
Zmiyovskaya Balka, which translates to "the ravine of snakes," is now the site of a towering memorial to those who died here. It consists of a cluster of stone figures with outstretched arms and terror, despair and sorrow etched in their faces. (more...)
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