The 80th anniversary of Babyn Yar, one of the most heinous crimes against humanity, perpetrated by the Nazis in Kyiv in September 1941, is being officially commemorated this week.
It’s one of those atrocities that has become a symbol of evil and barbarity, and a reminder of what humankind must guard against. An event that cannot be forgotten.
Yet there have been plenty of those who wanted the truth about what happened at Babyn Yar to be erased from historical memory, or its meaning distorted.
So, as we commemorate the tens of thousands who were so cruelly murdered there – primarily Jews, but also Ukrainians, Roma, Red Army prisoners of war, and others – let’s also pause to pay tribute to those who sought to keep the memory alive, and to record what happened there.
In my own case, it’s my mother Olha Sira. She spent her youth in Kyiv and witnessed the arrival of the Nazis before being taken for slave labor by them to Germany a year later in 1942.
When I was a young boy growing up in England in the 1950s, she would often tell me about what she experienced in Kyiv in those horrendous early 1940s.
The city’s main avenue Khreshchatyk was blown up by the Soviets a few days after the German forces took the city. The cries of hundreds of innocent civilians trapped in the ruins were to haunt her. And this merciless scorched earth tactic only provided the Nazis with a pretext – they blamed the Jews and began rounding them up.
My mother, visibly moved as she relived what she had witnessed, would describe how she saw hundreds of Kyiv’s Jews being marched off to an unknown destination which it only later became known was the makeshift killing field in the ravine called Babyn Yar.
“They were so helpless, dazed and resigned to their fate. They, and we – the bewildered onlookers, believed they were being assembled to be deported to some temporary holding center,” she recounted. “Old and young, women and men, all being herded together and led, unsuspecting, towards their death.”
Stalin did not want the wartime suffering of any group particularized and, therefore, incredible as it may now sound, for most of the Soviet period the Jewish Holocaust was officially downplayed.
This meant that Babyn Yar, where the Nazis began their ruthless mass extermination of the Jews, was not allowed to become a shrine to the victims of the Holocaust.
Nevertheless, there were writers and poets who defiantly sought to make the truth known. Among the first was the Ukrainian poet Mykola Bazhan. Within weeks of the Soviet recapture of Kyiv in late 1943, he was one of the officials who first revealed the gruesome site to western journalists. “There is no more terrible place on earth,” Bazhan told them.
John Gibbons, the Daily Worker Moscow correspondent, reported in October 1943: “When our group of foreign correspondents visited Babyn Yar, what we saw there convinced me of the awful truth of Bazhan’s words.”
But within a year and a half, the Soviet authorities did not want Babyn Yar even mentioned. When Bazhan published a new collection of poems in 1945, the censors removed Babyn from the title of his treatment of the sensitive subject and it was left as “Yar.”
Despite the official line, many others tried in their own way in the late 1940s and 1950s to tell the story of what had occurred in Babyn Yar. Eventually, during the relative political “thaw” under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, achieved a temporary breakthrough with what was probably his most famous poem – “Babiy Yar.”
It was published in the main Soviet literary newspaper in September 1961, on the 20th anniversary of the crime. Given the anti-Semitism still prevalent in the Soviet Union at the time, it was a bombshell, and the communist authorities were not pleased.
But, however powerful, this was a literary work and there was still no detailed documentary account of what had occurred at Babyn Yar. Not until the writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, who was born in Kyiv into a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family, dared to undertake this task. He was brought up by his grandparents near Babyn Yar and became obsessed with gathering information for the record.
A heavily censored version of Kuznetsov’s documentary novel about Babyn Yar was published in 1966. But even this was harshly criticized and soon effectively banned. The disappointed writer pretended to play along with the authorities but in 1969, while on a foreign assignment in London, defected.
Fortunately, Kuznetsov managed to smuggle out an uncensored version of his work and it was soon published in the West. His book finally did justice to the painful subject and triggered even more interest in it.
The author did not live long enough to see the book published in his homeland. He died in mysterious circumstances in London in 1979 aged 50. The official reason given was a heart attack, but many believed he was murdered by the KGB.
Meanwhile, in Kyiv itself, the first unofficial meeting to commemorate the victims of Babyn Yar was held at the site on the 25th anniversary, in September 1966. Among those who addressed the large unsanctioned gathering were the Russian writer, based in Kyiv, Viktor Nekrasov, and the Ukrainian literary critic symbolizing Ukraine’s new national assertiveness, Ivan Dziuba.
Despite the disapproval of the Soviet authorities, similar unofficial meetings continued to occur each year. Finally, a decade later, a monument was set up at the site in 1976 but, even then, it did not specifically mention Jewish victims, referring only to “citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of war.”
The situation changed only after Ukraine declared its independence in August 1991. In October of that year, the soon-to-be-elected president of independent Ukraine, former communist ideologist Leonid Kravchuk, spoke at an official commemoration at the site. And what he said was refreshingly bold, frank and inspiring:
“Babyn Yar was a genocide and not only the Nazis are to blame for it,” he declared. “Part of the blame lies with those who didn’t prevent them from carrying it out, so part of it is ours and we think it only natural to apologize before the Jewish people.”
Kravchuk went further, in effect castigating himself and the entire Soviet system. “We do not accept the ideological concept of the former [communist] Ukraine that neglected human rights, hid the truth about Babyn Yar, hid the truth about the number killed there and the fact most were of Jewish origin.”
Anti-Semitism would not be tolerated in the new Ukraine, the former communist party functionary proclaimed. “We are building statehood for all nationalities living on this land.”
That was 30 years ago, and 50 years after Babyn Yar had been assigned its notorious place in history. Today, and in more recent years, even the presidents of Israel and Germany have participated in the commemoration of the victims and pledged along with their Ukrainian co-mourners that the lessons of Babyn Yar have been well and truly heeded.
Babyn Yar has therefore gradually also become transformed into a symbol of reconciliation and renewed hope. But in a land littered with marked and unmarked mass graves of the victims of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism, it nevertheless is in a league of its own.
The work of all those who tried to perpetuate the memory of what happened in Babyn Yar and forced us to reflect on the ramifications, therefore, was not in vain and is appreciated.
