I stood at Babyn Yar just weeks ago - now Putin's bombs are erasing Jewish history

In Ukraine I had heard the last survivor of the massacre, Michael Sidko tell us that war is the worst thing in the world. I wonder what he thinks now: the nation he grew up in under attack, the grave containing his mother and siblings desecrated, the fear that in the days and weeks ahead many others across Ukraine stand to suffer as he once did under the Nazis.

The full extent of the damage to Babyn Yar is yet unknown, but five people are reported dead, and a building complex at the site has been partly destroyed.

Footage shot by emergency services on the scene shows firefighters walking through a thick cloud of smoke, moving past downed power lines and small fires that burn sporadically. The memorial site has been transformed into a smouldering ruin.

The irony of Putin damaging a deeply significant Jewish site just a week after launching a war to “de-Nazify” Ukraine is obvious. What is no doubt also clear to all those who visited Babyn Yar with me is that again the Russian state is helping to destroy the collective memory of the Shoah.

At Babyn Yar, a Catholic priest who for years who has been working to unearth einsatzgruppen killing sites across eastern Europe, Father Patrick Desbois, told us: “The Soviets did all they could to erase this place."

For 25 years after the massacre, the site remained untouched and unmarked. The Ukrainian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote in 1961: “No gravestone stands on Babyn Yar; Only coarse earth heaped roughly on the gash; Such dread comes over me.”

His words were in protest against a plan to build a sports stadium over the mass grave. The Soviet authorities reprimanded Yevtushenko for his “cosmopolitanism” in response.

Five years later a small obelisk was built on the site to commemorate the dead below. In 1976 a larger memorial statue was created, but neither acknowledged the antisemitic nature of the killing.

It was only in the 1990s that the newly independent Ukrainian began to recognise that Jews were killed for being Jews.

Now, more than 30 years since the Soviet regime relinquished control of Ukraine, a Russian army has invaded, and again Jewish history is being erased. Before, it was by totalitarian repression; now, through bombing.

That history has already been desecrated by Putin as he twists the legacy of the Holocaust to justify his invasion with his claims of “denazification”. But whatever atrocities lie in the country’s past, recent years have been very different.

The chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, Rabbi Meir Stambler told me on the eve of war: “Jews are here, we have very good years with our Ukrainian neighbours, we are part of the population, but you know, the ground is soaked with blood over here, Jewish blood.”

In the past five years, Holocaust education has been added to the Ukrainian curriculum; a Jewish Prime Minister and President have been elected; Jews can be found in every layer of public life.

Rabbi Stambler said: “When Putin tried in 2014, nobody knew about Ukraine. All those propagandas were okay then.

"To say that in Ukraine there is more antisemitism than anywhere else, definitely not. We’ve been here for many years and it’s just a lie. I don’t think the world buys it anymore.”

Over the days I spent talking to Jewish leaders from across Ukraine, the overwhelming sense was of a community overcoming its past.

There is a “renaissance” of Jewish life in the country, said one. Off the record, another told me that he fears antisemitism far more in London than Kyiv. That was just weeks ago, but it feels like another world.