The organizers of the memorial ceremony for the victims of the Babi Yar massacre spared no efforts to produce a respectful and dignified official event. Long before the dignitaries arrived for the ceremony, which took place yesterday in Kiev, Ukraine, soldiers were standing in rows, in spotless dress uniforms, at the entrance to the ceremonial plaza. Requiems and funeral marches emanated from the speakers.

The ceremony began with the presidents of Israel and Ukraine, together with their wives, walking in behind soldiers bearing wreaths. The many television cameras were focused on them, and thus did not capture the real heroes of the event, who were swallowed up in the crowd.

One of them is Vasili Mikhailovsky, formerly Katz, who was four years old 65 years ago. His father, a soldier in the Red Army, was executed by German soldiers. The cleaning woman in his parents' home, who had informed on his father to the Germans, told his Ukrainian nanny: "Take your little Jew quickly to Babi Yar."

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Some 160,000 Jews lived in Kiev on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but many managed to flee east before the German army got there. Ten days after the invasion, on September 28, 1941 - Yom Kippur eve - posters were put up in the streets of Kiev instructing all Jews to report to the cemetery and bring clothes, money and personal documents.

"People thought that they were going on a long journey, perhaps to Palestine, and they took the entire contents of their homes with them," Mikhailovsky said. The little boy was almost crushed by the crowd. "Classical music was playing very loudly and there was the sound of planes. I remember SS guards and Ukrainian police pushed people forward. They were holding German shepherds half unleashed. A dog jumped on me and grabbed my bag. He bit my nanny in the shoulder and I fell down. I was covered in blood and I fainted. Then I realized that the nanny had taken me back to Kiev. I couldn't talk for a few months afterward."

33,170 killed in two days

The Jews were divided into groups of men, women and children. They were forced to undress, then shot at the edge of a forested ravine. They were buried in antitank ditches dug by the Soviets and covered with dirt by prisoners. The shooters reported more than 33,170 people murdered in two days.

In the following months, thousands of additional Jews - who had hidden, but who were caught by informers - were also murdered. The number of informers was so great that the Gestapo complained of a lack of manpower. All told, about 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar, including gypsies, Soviet war prisoners, communists, Ukrainians and others. When the German army began to retreat, prisoners were used to destroy the bodies, leaving no trace of the mass murder.

But the horrible sound of the shots still echoes in Yelena Korovchevskaya's memory. She heard them from her home in Kiev, about a kilometer from Babi Yar. "I was 15 then," she said yesterday. "From September to May, there were shots almost every day. The neighbors told us they were shooting Jews." Korovchevskaya said that people were not allowed into the area.

Leonid Bernstein, 86, lost his father and his uncle in Babi Yar. Bernstein, who fought with the Russian partisans, came to live in Israel in 1993. He has been coming to Babi Yar for the last 20 years to honor the victims' memory.

After the war, Babi Yar became the world's best-known mass murder site, partly due to the poem "Babi Yar," published in 1961 by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and to Dimitri Shostakovich's 13th symphony, composed a year later. In 1966, the Soviets agreed to put up a monument nearby, but did not mention that most of the victims were Jewish. After the fall of the Soviet Union, another monument was put up near the edge of the ravine in memory of the Jewish victims.

"Today, everyone in Ukraine knows that Jews were murdered here," said Bernstein. "But it's a pity that no one notes that out of 1,000 murderers, only 150 were German, and all the rest were Ukrainians."