This place, Kyiv’s western outskirts in 1941, is known all over the world. For some, Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) is a symbol of manslaughter, genocide, a well-thought-out and systemic state-sponsored terrorism which a totalitarian government resorts to (a certain instructive, but, undoubtedly, incomplete analogy here is Bykivnia). Some (unfortunately, very few) can vividly imagine – from the reminiscences of eyewitnesses, documents, books, such as, above all, Babi Yar by Anatoli Kuznetsov, the articles and lectures of Viktor Nekrasov and Ivan Dziuba – what it was, what savage and, at the same time, “calm” and cool cruelty those who biologically belonged to the human race were capable of…
But for some others (and there are frighteningly many of them), the tragedy of Babi Yar is an annoying and ritual obstacle, something meaningless and unneeded: well, it happened a long time ago, but what does it have to do with us? Please leave us alone, we already have a lot of problems… Finally, some (they exist because there are many of those who want “to live in peace”) regard, consciously or unconsciously, that horror as a reference point and take on a blasphemous evil – to decide, in lieu of the Ultimate Judge, who will and who will not live. Reader, you don’t agree? Then look at that time, at Auschwitz, Dachau, Majdanek, and Katyn at Vorkuta, Kolyma, Solovki, punishment camps and other GULAG components; at genocide in the 1991-95 war in Yugoslavia; at the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (at least a million deaths – but are there many people now who remember this?). Let us finally look at what Putin’s and the “Russian World’s” armed soldiers are doing in eastern Ukraine (they must be called occupiers, not “illegal armed formations” or “militants,” for they kill and torture for the Ukrainian language, our flag, and any kind of indocility) and in Syria (deliberate mass-scale killings of civilians, including old-age persons, women, and children; the bombing of hospitals, schools, and humanitarian stores); at what “Islamic State” butchers are doing (mass-scale slaughter of the Yazidis alone has the signs of genocide).
Photo by Ruslan KANIUKA, The Day
It is not so difficult to guess what is common to all these worldwide evil deeds, from Babi Yar to this day. It is, firstly, the savage spirit of racial, ethnic, religious, and political superiority (and, hence, intolerance). But there is also another, not so conspicuous, moment. There is a thing common to all abovementioned genocidal tragedies, including the Ukrainian Holodomor-genocide: butchers-perpetrators view the merciless destruction of dozens, hundreds, thousands, and millions of people (as a rule, civilians outside the battlefield) as “work,” “obeying orders,” or, in modern parlance, a technological “option,” when you often cannot just see the victims. This, pardon the expression, “mentality” of killers is a terrible menace to humankind.
Some will say: Babi Yar executioners could see their defenseless victims (unlike Paul Tibbets in the nuclear bomber over Hiroshima, who just “pushed the button” and wiped out 150,000 civilians). Yes, they could. But, to have a clear picture of what it was, let me quote Anatoli Kuznetsov’s documentary novel Babi Yar (printed in a heavily bowdlerized version in the journal Yunost in 1966. Three years later, the author was forced to leave the USSR). Here are the lines: “There came an officer who led two girls aged 15-16. The girls were begging, weeping, kneeling to the ground in an attempt to kiss the officer’s boots. They implored to do anything to them but not to shoot them dead. They wore identical clean dark dresses and pigtails. ‘We are from an orphanage,’ they cried out, ‘we don’t know our ethnicity. We were brought there when we were babies!’ The officer was looking at them and stepping back. He ordered the girls and Dina to follow him. They came to the place where people were undressing. As before, there was a heap of clothes and footwear there. Further, beyond the belongings, 30 or 40 old and sick men and women were sitting. They must have been the remnants caught in apartments [! – Author]. An old paralyzed woman lay wrapped in a blanket. Dina and the girls were told to sit down next to them. The girls were sobbing quietly. They were killed in a few minutes.”
This is how that terrible day, September 29, 1941, began 75 years ago. In only two days, the Nazis shot dead at least 35,000 people, mostly Jews, in the tract of Babi Yar (known since 1401, when a tavern keeper, who owned this land, sold it to a Dominican monastery. The place was later referred to as Bisova Baba and Shalena Baba). The total number of those executed in Babi Yar (shootings continued until November 1943, when the Soviet Army came) is estimated from 70 to 200 thousand (historians have not yet come to a common conclusion). Among those killed there are Jews (Viktor Nekrasov said: “Indeed, not only Jews died there. But only Jews were killed there just because they were Jews.” It is a terrible gospel truth. At the same time, we must say as clearly as possible that no nation or social group should “privatize” this horrible tragedy), Roma, at least 600 OUN (Melnyk faction) members, including Olena Teliha and her husband, Soviet prisoners of war, communist activists, underground fighters, hostages, “saboteurs,” “curfew violators,” etc. The death toll is dozens of thousands of people (the Nuremberg Trial heard a perhaps underrated figure of 100,000). We must understand today that Humans, just defenseless Humans, died there.
September 29 and 30 were only the beginning of the killings. A well-known historian, Professor Viktor Korol, writes: “In five days, beginning with September 29, over 100,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed in Babi Yar. Concurrently, from mid-October 1941 until late September 1943, Babi Yar was the place of regular executions and burials carried out by the security police and SD in close collaboration with Kyiv’s military and civil authorities.” And the Nazis’ Report on Events in the USSR dated October 2, 1941, emphasized: “Sonderkommando 4a, in collaboration with the group’s staff and two units of the South police regiment, executed 33,771 Jews in Kyiv on September 29 and 30, 1941 (What accuracy! It is also part of “genocide as work”). As is known, the first victims of Babi Yar slaughterers were hapless mental patients at a nearby special hospital, for the Nazis considered this kind of people as “unnecessary.” It is also known that the Kyiv Holocaust was preceded by an order of the German commandant made public in the Russian and Ukrainian languages: “I order all the Jews of Kiev and its outskirts to gather on Monday, September 29, 1941, at 8 a.m. on the intersection of Melnyka [Melnykova. – Author] and Dokterivska [Dehtiarivska. – Author] streets near the cemetery. Everybody must have documents, money, underwear, etc. Whoever fails to obey this order will be executed. Whoever occupies a Jew’s tenement or steals any objects from this tenement [! – Author] will be executed.” Just fancy this: the ill-fated and doomed people sincerely believed that they were being sent to the “civilized” Germany “to work”! But they were going to meet a sure death…
Who is personally responsible for this genocide? Major-General Kurt Eberhard, who issued the order to shoot, was not convicted – he committed suicide in 1947 in Stuttgart. Another war criminal, Einsatzgruppe chief Paul Blobel, was hanged by court decision in 1951. Finally, Helmut Quitzrau, General Commissar of Kyiv in 1941, was not brought to criminal justice at all and died in 1999. And Otto Rasch, chief of the security police and SD in the 101st zone land forces’ jurisdiction, who supervised mass-scale shootings in Babi Yar, was arrested after the war and tried by a US court-martial in Nuremberg as a defendant in the case of SD operational groups, but he died in prison in November 1948.
Another, very important, question is the attitude of the Soviet “top” to this tragedy. As historian Volodymyr Viatrovych, director of the Institute of National Memory, justly writes, the USSR’s totalitarian leadership deliberately hushed up and distorted the truth about this horrible Nazi crime, first of all, for ideological reasons: the Jews, dozens of thousands of whom fell in Babi Yar, and Ukrainian nationalists, also victims of mass-scale shootings in the same terrible tract, were the “politically undesirable,” if not hostile, categories of the killed people. But if most of the executed were Soviet soldiers (naturally, they were also there), then… So everything was done to hush up the tragedy (although, in other cases, the totalitarian government widely reported to the world about the crimes of Nazis, hiding, of course, their own) or to shift the main blame for the Holocaust to “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists,” while the public activists, not only Jews, who resisted these lies, were accused of … “Zionism.” Both Nekrasov and Kuznetsov were also on the receiving end in this case.
On the other hand, it is difficult to agree with Viatrovych when he argues that the terrible Babi Yar executions were the consequence of the NKVD-organized explosions in downtown Kyiv on September 24-25, 1941. This is hardly the case, for the Nazis had long been “programmed” for Babi Yar by force of their life philosophy.
The facts are as follows. In March 1945, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Ukrainian SSR government adopted the resolution “On Building a Memorial Monument on the Territory of Babi Yar.” In 1947, this monument was included into the plan of Kyiv’s reconstruction and development (until 1950). But the Stalin-initiated anti-Semitic campaign of “struggling against cosmopolitism” made it impossible to erect this monument. Moreover, it was decided in 1950 to fill Babi Yar with the Petrovsky Brickyard’s industrial wastes (!) in order to create a flat relief, lay transport routes across the ravine, and lay out a park. The direct result of this (as well as of flouting elementary safety regulations) was the Kurenivka tragedy on March 13, 1961, – a dike failed to withstand pressure and the ensuing landslide left at least 1,500 people dead.
The 1960s were marked with a powerful civic movement: people demanded to be told the truth about Babi Yar and to properly honor the memory of its victims (let us recall again with gratitude the names of Ivan Dziuba, Viktor Nekrasov, Viacheslav Chornovil, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Dmitry Shostakovich, and many others). It was not until July 2, 1976, that a monument was unveiled with the government’s permission with an insincere, to put it mildly, inscription: “To the Soviet citizens and Soviet Army prisoners of war executed by the German Nazis in Babi Yar.” Naturally, this typical ideological construct of the Brezhnev era came under the scathing criticism of honest historians and human rights activists, especially outside the USSR. Today, there are 25 monuments in and near Babi Yar, including those to honor the memory of the executed Jews, 621 OUN members, children, Archimandrite Oleksandr (Vyshniakov) and Archpriest Pavlo who called for disobeying the German occupiers.
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Ukraine, as a state, has declared the European option of development. Being able to feel the pain of a “different one,” zero tolerance of any violence, all the more so of war crimes, is the most important component of European values. To mark the 75th anniversary of Babi Yar, guests are coming here from Europe (including President Joachim Gauck of Germany), the State of Israel, and other parts of the world. We will all come together and say once and for all: this must occur never again! (But we cannot help remembering eastern Ukraine and Syria, as we have said above.) This will not occur again only if the world community begins at last to view manslaughter as the most heinous crime that comes under the jurisdiction of an earthly court (that will pass the harshest sentence) as well as under the judgment of the One Who said: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay.”
