Dina Pronicheva

Dina (Vera) Mironovna Pronicheva (Ukrainian: Діна Миронівна Пронічева, Dina Mironivna Pronicheva; January 7, 1911 in Chernihiv, Ukraine – 1977) was a Soviet Jewish actress at the Kiev Puppet Theatre, and a survivor of the September 29–30, 1941 Babi Yar massacre in Kiev.[1]

Initially she tore up her identity card and claimed that she was not Jewish and was only seeing someone off, but the Germans decided to kill her anyway so that she would not be a witness. She was then ordered to march to the ravine, to be forced to undress and then be shot. Jumping before being shot and falling on other bodies, she played dead in a pile of corpses. She held perfectly still while the Nazis continued to shoot the wounded or gasping victims. Although the SS had covered the mass grave with earth, she eventually managed to climb through the soil and escape. Since it was dark, she had to avoid the flashlights of the Nazis finishing off the remaining victims still alive, wounded and gasping in the grave.

Pronicheva on the witness stand at a Kiev war-crimes trial of fifteen members of the German police responsible for the occupied Kiev region (January 24, 1946).

She was one of the very few survivors of the massacre. At least 28 other survivors are known.[2][3][4] However, she was the only survivor to testify afterwards at the January 24, 1946 Kiev-based war-crimes trial.

She later related her horrifying story to writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, who incorporated it into his novel Babi Yar, published in Yunost in 1966.[5][6]