Empathy and concern over her city’s slipping memory of what happened at the Babi Yar ravine colored National Polytechnic University student Svetlana Polkovnikova’s decision to intern with the new Babi Yar IWalk, an educational program that put on a walk around the area guided by testimony clips from the Visual History Archive.

“I joined the young interns program because it is very important for me to spread information about the events that happened in Babi Yar,” Polkovnikova said. “I would like modern society to know what happened here not so long ago.”

Among several young professionals trained by USC Shoah Foundation Ukraine regional consultant Anna Lenchovska to lead the new IWalk, Polkovnikova’s concern with remembering what happened is far from shocking.

Over the course of one week in 1941, nearly 34,000 Jews from Kiev were shot to death by SS, German police units and their auxiliaries at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of the city. One of the largest mass murders at a single location during World War II, the massacre paved the way for tens of thousands of Roma, Communist and Soviet prisoners of war to be killed there at the ravine too, in the subsequent months.

For the over 100,000 killed in total at the ravine, 100 testimonies in the Visual History Archive live on with mentions of the Babi Yar ravine or massacre. Along the IWalk, participants - many of whom are high school students - could walk through the historic site and through the Babi Yar memorial while watching testimony clips from the Visual History archive on tablet devices. The clips cover the history of Babi Yar and both pre-war and occupied Kiev; the stories of the killing and of the survival; the commemoration; and the denial.

“For me, it is important to conduct IWalks because now not so many people know their family history or the history of their city,” Polkovnikova said. “I do not want the tragedy of Babi Yar to happen again.”

Polkovnikova and other students were all recruited by Lenchovska to lead the IWalks because of their work with TolerSpace, an Kiev NGO developed in 2013 as part of a series of projects promoting tolerance under the Congress of Communities of Ukraine, to create an educational space around discussion of human rights and tolerance.

As a guide, Polkovnikova went through training with other students under Lenchovska, which prepared her to help lead 10 IWalks between Sept. 26 and Oct. 7. Although she had some worries about how attendees would react to her lead and some unease over the possibility of “radicals” coming and “spoiling the excursion,” Polkovnikova was ultimately happy with how her IWalks turned out.

“I worried and thought nobody would listen to me,” Polkovnikova said. “I was afraid I’d forget what I was supposed to say at certain IWalk stops, but then my stress disappeared and I was satisfied with how interested the teenagers all seemed to be. It was exciting for me to see how people who came reacted to my words - whether they were interested or not, whether they’d heard of Babi Yar before.”

The interactive nature of the tour, with the tablets and the physicality of walking around the area, made the experience more hard-hitting for Polkovnikova.

“From testimonies on tablets, teenagers may watch and listen to stories of real people who survived the events,” Polkovnikova said. “From a dry history, this became a story one can feel himself. This became a way to feel what people who survived Babi Yar felt.”