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Part Three: The Volftsun Siblings 113 could be patched up and returned to the ont to fight, or if the soldier needed to be sent to a hospital in the rear for further recovery. If the injuries were so severe the solider would not be able to fight again, she prepared the documents that would cause the soldier to be discharged om the army aer recovery. It was exhausting work to make such decisions every day, decisions that oen spelled the difference between life and death. Her unit was bombed on many occasions, but her worst memory is that of Babi Yar, near Kiev. When Rosa visited, Soviet soldiers were exhuming bodies om mass graves. "We saw om afar the pits and the piles of bodies," she says. "The smell was terrible. I saw a scene that still haunts me and brings tears to my eyes in the retelling." She saw a tall, handsome Russian officer kneeling at a pile of bodies of women and children. He carefully snipped a lock of hair om the corpses of a woman and a child, and put the hair in the breast pocket over his heart. Then he wordlessly walked away. The bodies were those of his wife and child. Death was a constant companion to Rosa, and not just in the soldiers she treated. She herself lost many relatives to the war, including her mother's eldest brother Benesh and his family. When Benesh and his family hid om the Germans in the woods, the German soldiers followed their tracks in the snow and found their hideaway. Benesh, Rosa's aunt, and two of their children were executed. Only the elder daughter, Eydia, who had evacuated to Tashkent with her university, survived. Rosa marched across Europe with her field hospital, first as a doctor's assistant, later as chief of staff. She celebrated V-Day in Berlin. Rosa dispels the legend that a service woman who has been at the ont is necessarily world- wise and loose in her morals. Baloney, she says Kiev was the capital of the Ukraine when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Some 160,000 Jews resided in Kiev, comprising about 20 percent of the city's population. Approximately 100,000 Jews fled Kiev in advance of the German occupation. German forces entered Kiev on September 19, 1941. Along with the rest of the Ukraine, the city was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, headed by East Prussian Nazi district leader Erich Koch. During the first days of the German occupation, two major explosions, apparently set off by Soviet military engineers, destroyed the German headquarters and part of the city center. The Germans used the sabotage as a pretext to murder the remaining Jews of Kiev. At that time, there were about 60,000 Jews in the city. Most of those who remained were women, children, the elderly, and the sick. On September 28, 1941, members of Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing unit) C, supported by other SS and German police units and Ukrainian auxiliaries, murdered more than half of the Jewish population of Kiev at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of the city. This was one of the largest mass murders at an individual location during World War II. As the victims moved into the ravine, Einsatzgruppe detachments shot them in small groups. According to reports by the Einsatzgruppe to headquarters, 33,771 Jews were massacred in two days. In the months following the massacre, German authorities stationed at Kiev killed thousands more Jews at Babi Yar, as well as non-Jews including Roma (Gypsies), communists, and Soviet prisoners of war. It is estimated that some 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar. The Soviet army liberated Kiev on November 6, 1943. Although the retreating German army had attempted to eradicate evidence of the atrocity, a number of mass graves remained, and Soviet soldiers were assigned to search Babi Yar and exhume bodies. It was at this time that Rosa visited and witnessed the tragic scene that remains a vivid memory for her to this day. Babi Yar

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