Schindler's List director Steven Spielberg presented a documentary on Ukrainian Holocaust survivors on Wednesday in Kiev in his first visit to his ancestral home.
The film, Spell Your Name, by Ukrainian director Serhiy Bukovsky, recounts the testimony of survivors after the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews at the Babi Yar ravine in 1941.
"The stories and experience of survivors in Ukraine need to be seen and heard by the people of the world, who may not know what happened in Ukraine during the Holocaust," Spielberg said at a news conference for the 90-minute documentary, which he co-produced with Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk.
Steven Spielberg presented a documentary by Ukrainian director Serhiy Bukovsky called Spell Your Name, about the Nazi massacre of Jews at the Babi Yar ravine.
(Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press)
The massacre began in late September when the Nazi forces occupying the Ukrainian capital of Kiev marched the city's Jewish residents to the edge of the ravine and shot them. More than 33,700 Jews were killed in the first two days, Sept. 29 and 30.
"This film is not only the memory of my people, this is the memory of my family, too," said Anatoly Kerzhner, a historian at a Kiev-based institute whose grandmother was shot dead at Babi Yar.
The nation marked the 65th anniversary of the event on Sept. 30 of this year. More than 100,000 others were killed in the occupation's ensuing months, including people of Roma descent, Soviet army prisoners and Kiev residents.
The film was produced by Spielberg's USC Shoah Foundation Institute, a Los Angeles-based organization founded in 1994 to act as a visual history archive of the Holocaust.
"I really believe that listening to the stories of Holocaust survivors from all around the world is going to change the world and already has in many ways," Spielberg said.
It was the U.S. director's first visit to the country of his grandparents.
"I got out of the plane at the airport today and said: 'I'm at home!"' he remarked.
Schindler's List, his film recounting the efforts of German industrialist Oscar Schindler to save 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust, won the best picture Oscar in 1993.
With files from the Associated PressRelated
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