Despite living and going to school near Kiev, 11th grader Angelina Verbovskaya knew very little about the 1941 Babi Yar massacre when she started her training to lead the new Babi Yar IWalk.

“I’m ashamed that I even did not know that Babi Yar is located in Kiev,” Verbovskaya said.

But that quickly changed. Verbovskaya was one of 10 high school students and five young educators trained by USC Shoah Foundation Ukraine regional consultant Anna Lenchovska to lead the new Babi Yar IWalk, an educational walk guided by testimony clips from the Visual History Archive.

Nearly 34,000 Jews from Kiev were shot to death on September 29 and 30, 1941, by SS and German police units and their auxiliaries at Babi Yar, a ravine in the northwest of the city. The massacre was one of the largest mass murders at a single location during World War II. In the months after the massacre, tens of thousands more were killed there, including Roma, Communists and Soviet prisoners of war, for a total of about 100,000 killed in total at Babi Yar.

Over 100 testimonies in the Visual History Archive mention the Babi Yar ravine or massacre.

On the Babi Yar IWalk, participants walk through the historic site of Babi Yar and the Babi Yar memorial while watching testimony clips from the Visual History Archive on tablet devices. The clips cover the history of Babi Yar, pre-war and occupied Kiev, the killings, stories of survival, commemoration and denial.

Lenchovska called on the teenagers and young educators who attend the Tolerspace educational center in Kiev, which has piloted testimony-based educational programs before, to serve as “peer guides” of the Babi Yar IWalk. She took a group of 10 teens and five educators on the IWalk for a practical training session on Sept. 24, preparing them to lead 10 IWalks from Sept. 26 to Oct. 7. The IWalks were attended by school groups and also local professionals and opinion makers.

Verbovskaya said she was interested in leading fellow students on the Babi Yar IWalk and became even more passionate about sharing her newfound knowledge of the massacre once she went through the training. Some of the facts were scary and shocking, she said.

The peer guides discussed at the training the possibility of people in their tour group being antisemitic or asking provocative or controversial questions. Verbovskaya was nervous to lead her first IWalk, but it went very well, she said.

“At my first IWalk I was worrying a lot, that I will not be able to share with kids the whole scope of information that I have prepared, in a clear but not boring way,” Verbovskaya said. “I was lucky to get a good co-intern and a positive group, so the IWalk went smoothly, without any problems and risks that we have considered at the preparatory workshop.”

Verbovskaya said she believes people should know the history of their homeland, and IWalks help make this history more interesting.

“One thing is when you read a dry text, with dates, numbers, geographic and people’s names etc. And another thing is when you are visiting those places, and are trying to imagine all of these events that you’ve read or knew about, to learn from eyewitnesses while analyzing all information,” she said. “I am confident that after such a “lesson of history” one will not forget about this event.”