Occupied Kyiv: A Knock at the Door
, born in 1901, is an Orthodox priest at the Church of the Intercession (Pokrov), in the Podil district of Kyiv. The son of a theologian, ordained shortly before the war, he lives with his wife and their children in the parish outbuildings. As soon as the German forces arrived, he drew attention by refusing to pray for Hitler, for which he was beaten.
Kyiv fell at the end of September 1941. On 29 and 30 September, behind the lines, mobile units rounded up and then shot more than 33,000 of the city's Jews in the ravine of Babi Yar. The mass executions continued in the following weeks. A few Jews survived by hiding or by slipping away from the columns; they wander a city where denunciation is encouraged and where the occupier has made it known that hiding a Jew is punishable by death, for the offender and for their family alike.
One evening, hunted Jewish neighbours knock at the rectory door and ask for refuge. Glagolev knows what he is risking: sheltering these families in the bell tower and buildings of the parish, and supplying them with forged baptism certificates bearing Ukrainian names, at the peril of his own family; turning them away into the night so as not to expose his own; or refusing to house them on site while trying to find them another refuge outside the city.
Occupied Kyiv, December 1941, Aleksey Glagolev, a priest in Podil: what to do with the Jewish neighbours knocking at his door?
hid Jewish families in the bell tower and buildings of the Church of the Intercession and provided them with forged baptism certificates bearing Ukrainian names; his wife gave her own papers to a Jewish woman to save her. The Babi Yar ravine is no euphemism: on 29 and 30 September 1941, and its auxiliaries shot dead 33,771 Jews there, and the site remained a place of mass executions until 1943, with a total exceeding 100,000 dead. In occupied territory, hiding a Jew was punishable by death, often for entire families. At that cost, rescuers made the opposite choice: on 12 September 1991, Yad Vashem recognised Aleksey and Tatiana Glagolev, along with their daughter, as Righteous Among the Nations, among the hundreds of Righteous honoured in Ukraine.
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