Last week it was announced that Russian bombs damaged the Babi Jar memorial center in Kiev. “History repeats itself,” President Zelensky responded with the doggedness that has already made him legendary. What history?
It was indeed extremely macabre that this very center was hit, even though the intention was to bomb the nearby television tower. Macabre because one of the most infamous mass murders of the Second World War took place in Babi Jar.
Babi Jar (Ukrainian for ‘Ravine of Old Women’) is a ravine in northwestern Kiev. At the beginning of the war, 175,000 Jews lived in Kiev, 100,000 of whom fled the Nazis, who took the city on September 19, 1941. On September 29 and 30, 34,000 Jews were driven from the ghetto to the ravine, located next to the Jewish cemetery. There they had to undress and descend into the ravine, after which they were murdered by the Germans with machine guns. Babi Jar then turned into a camp where mainly Gypsies and Russian prisoners of war died. A total of 100,000 people were killed in Babi Jar.
Reading about Babi Jar on the website Traces of War I noticed a resemblance to the situation Kiev seems to be in at the moment. From the south and the north, Kiev was surrounded by two German troops Panzergruppenfollowed by the collapse, even though Stalin had ordered his soldiers to keep the city at all costs.
After the war, the Russians had little need for a memorial to Babi Jar. As late as 1961, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published the poem ‘Babi Jar’ with the opening line: There is no monument at Babi Jar. There is only the sheer abyss, like a rough memorial stone. I’m afraid.
Yevtushenko criticized the anti-Semitic silence of the Soviet government about the mass murder of the Jews. A monument to Babi Jar was not erected until 1976, but the inscription did not mention any Jewish victims. That happened in 1991 at a new monument for the Jewish victims.
On the website Window on Russia wrote Hella Rottenberg: “Babi Jar symbolized the mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Union in two ways: for the crime itself and for the silence of the Holocaust after the war. Yevtushenko broke the silence with his poem and received massive acclaim from liberal citizens and students. He (…) was able to get it published thanks to the fact that a political and cultural thaw had set in under party leader Khrushchev.”
The poem in Marko Fondse’s translation is too long to quote in its entirety, but I cannot resist making an exception for this terse stanza: Oh, Russia of my heart, I know that you are / International, by nature. / But often do they, whose hands are soaked in filth, misuse Your purest name, in the name of hatred. (The poem can be read under Rottenberg’s article on Raam op Russia.)
Similar miserable developments are now taking place in Ukraine in the name of hatred under the Russian flag. They haven’t degenerated into mass murder yet, but no one should be surprised if Putin doesn’t even back down from that – and the Jew Zelensky will certainly not be spared.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of March 7, 2022