"KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Bells gently tolled as Ukrainian and foreign dignitaries on Wednesday commemorated the 65th anniversary of the Nazi massacre of Jews at the Babi Yar ravine, placing flower-encircled candles at the foot of a giant monument to the tens of thousands of victims."

"The massacre began on Sept. 29, 1941, when Soviet Kiev's Nazi occupiers ordered all Jews to report to a ravine on the outskirts of town.

The Jews thought they would be taken to a ghetto, and Kiev residents recalled their Jewish neighbors lugging their most valuable belongings out to the ravine.

But when they got there, the Jews were forced to undress and gather in lines along the ravine's steep embankment. There, the Nazis machine-gunned down the crowd, killing at least 33,771 over 48 hours. In the ensuing months, the number of people killed at Babi Yar grew to more than 100,000."

"Moshe Kantor, founder of the World Holocaust Forum that is organizing the events, said the world's silence after Babi Yar emboldened the Nazis to embark on their "final solution" of death camps that ultimately killed 6 million European Jews.

"We must be carriers of these stories," Kantor said.

The exact death toll at Babi Yar remains unknown. The Nazi executioners recorded the number of Jews killed in the first two days, but there are no exact records of subsequent killings. In 1943, as the Red Army approached to free Ukraine, the Nazis ordered Jewish prisoners to dig up the corpses and burn them."