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antisemitism, art, Babi Yar, Babyn Yar, Бабин Яр, Ба́бий Яр, genocide, history, holocaust, Jewish, poem, poetry, Pogrom, Russia, Ukraine, World War, Yevtushenko
Ukraine is no stranger to horror and sorrow at the hands of an evil occupying force.
On September 28, 1941, there were 35,000 Jews living in Nazi-occupied Kyiv. On October 1st, there were none.
On 9/26, the following order was posted all around Kyiv in Ukrainian, Russian, and German:
- All Yids[a] of the city of Kiev and its vicinity must appear on Monday, 29 September, by 8 o’clock in the morning at the corner of Mel’nikova and Dokterivskaya streets (near the Viis’kove cemetery). Bring documents, money and valuables, and also warm clothing, linen, etc. Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilians who enter the dwellings left by Yids and appropriate the things in them will be shot.
34,000 Jewish people showed up with children and their valuables, expecting to board a train to a better life. Instead they were transported to a nearby ravine called The Crone’s Gulch. (Russian: Ба́бий Яр-Babi Yar, Ukrainian: Бабин Яр-Babyn Yar) where their possessions, including the clothing they were wearing, were confiscated along with any property they brought with them.
Children were separated from adults. Young women were taken aside and raped in view of their families and friends. Anyone who resisted was clubbed or summarily shot.
They were marched, naked, to the bottom of the gully and made to lie down on the corpses that preceded them, occasionally with a thin layer of bloody earth intervening . They were machine-gunned where they lay.
Some were lined up on the rim of the ravine, shot, and then tumbled over the edge onto the haphazard heap of corpses at the bottom. Some were forced off the cliff, their broken bodies machine-gunned from the rim to finish the job. The soldiers then descended into the pit, walking on the dead to search out and dispatch any survivors.
Some were still alive when the ravine was filled in by soviet prisoners of war, who were themselves then murdered and added to the mass grave. A few of the wounded were able to dig themselves out that night, and escape into the darkness.
Organized and brisk, Nazis killed and buried nearly 34,000 Jews in less than 36 hours. In the months that followed the ravine was used to dispose of the bodies of Ukrainian nationalists, political prisoners, Roma, mental patients from the Pavlov Institute, and numerous others. Overall, more than 100,000 souls died at Babyn Yar before the Red Army liberated Kyiv at the end of 1943.
As the Red Army approached, the Nazi occupiers concealed their atrocities by disinterring the bodies and burning them in huge pyres that took several days to burn out. The ashes were then spread out on the crop lands of the steppe. The Soviets continued the concealment. Throughout the Stalinist era it was a crime to speak aloud of Babyn Yar for fear that the Jews who suffered and died there would be afforded a higher tier of martyrdom than other Russian heroes of the war.
Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Eichmann were so impressed with the efficiency of the operations at Babyn Yar, and the world’s seeming indifference to what happened there, that they were inspired to scale up the operations to what the Third Reich called the Final Solution to the Jewish problem, what the rest of the world calls the Holocaust. Millions more lives were consumed in that ultimate horror.
It all began at Babyn Yar.
In March 2022, during Putin’s War, this area underwent Russian bombardment. The target may have been a strategically important TV tower adjacent to the site. Intentional or not, bombing Bobyn Yar seems an odd way to de-Nazify Ukraine.
With all due respect to Yevtushenko, I think A.Z.Foreman’s translation, and his reading, is the best treatment of this powerful material in English. His plain speech prosody and serious tone of voice strike just the right chord. Histrionics are an unnecessary distraction–the horror of those days carries its own weight
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