Babiy Yar

Yesterday in Kiev there was a commemoration at Babiy Yar, the infamous gorge in which tens of thousands of Ukraine’s Jews were murdered by the invading German army in 1941. (Later on in the occupation, Babi Yar was also used to massacre gypsies, other Ukrainians and Russian prisoners of war.) President Viktor Yuschenko and the presidents of Israel and Croatia all gathered for an event attended by thousands of Ukrainians. A quick taxi ride turned into an hour-long odyssey as traffic all over the city was at a standstill for hours as the scale of the commemoration was so huge.

It’s a sign of how radically things here have changed in the past fifteen years. Under the Soviet regime, the plaques marking mass murders of Jews during World War II paid tribute only to the Soviet citizens killed by fascist invaders. In a Soviet Union that wished to suppress ethnic or religious distinctions, there was no room to acknowledge the particular suffering of Ukraine’s Jews. Uncle Joe’s raging anti-Semitism may have had something to do with it too.

Sixty five years ago this morning, the following notices appeared all over Kiev:

“All Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity are to report by 8 o'clock on the morning of Monday, September 29, 1941, to the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets (near the cemetery). They are to take with them documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc. Any Jew not carrying out this instruction and who is found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilian entering flats evacuated by Jews and stealing property will be shot.” 

Thinking they were going to be deported, many of Kiev’s Jews turned up. They were butchered and left in the ravine of Babi Yar. The Jews of Ivano-Frankivsk, 40% of that town's population, were marched to their own graveyard to be mordered. By the end of the German occupation, about 100,000 of Kiev’s 175,000 Jews were dead, with the help of local collaborators and some Ukrainian nationalists who briefly fancied their chances under the Germans. 

In a country that lost upwards of ten million people in the 1930s to the Soviet-created famine, collectivisation and communist party purges – and a country that lost a greater portion of its population in World War II than did Germany – some ambivalence about the need to mark the special suffering of the Jews might be understandable, though not excusable. I have the sense that Ukraine still suffers from the missing millions that might have made this country a different place. You can’t walk across Maidan Square without wondering a little about the people who are missing, the Ukrainians who were never born.

Like the rest of central and eastern Europe, Ukraine’s Jewish population was decimated in World War II. Of the two and three quarter million Jews in Ukraine (or an area approximating to modern day Ukraine) at the turn of the nineteenth century, only 486,000 remained in 1989. That was less than 1% of the population.  As in other post-Soviet countries, once visa restrictions for departures were lifted, Jews flowed out of Ukraine to Israel. Between 1989 and 2002, about half of the remaining Jewish population left Ukraine.

Independence hasn’t meant exit for all of Ukraine’s Jews. Some have proved especially nimble at adapting to the new order. Next month, a documentary film about the Holocaust in Ukraine will premiere in Kiev. Its executive producers are Steven Spielberg and Viktor Pinchuk. This film may help modern Ukrainians and many others to appreciate this less well known part of Ukraine’s bloody history.

So much of Ukraine’s self-willed transformation is focused on the future; on incorporating European standards and harmonising with EU laws and on joining international organisations like the WTO or the Council of Europe.  But this part of Ukraine’s rehabilitation into the European mainstream  requires the country to acknowledge and come to terms with its own past. Yesterday’s commemoration is a part of that process.

(Most of numerical data above comes from Andrew Wilson’s and Anna Reid's histories of Ukraine noted in the list of recommended books.)

Comments

[Christina]

Reading your account moved me to look up Yevtuschenko's poem.

http://www.remember.org/witness/babiyar.html

Or (stronger translation)...

http://www.sequencer.com/kcs/music/shost_babiy.php#english

I first read it in university and was shocked, at once, to learn of the horrific events it remembered and the political veneer the place had acquired. Until then, my notion of the USSR was vague and somewhat rose-tinted. The events of Babi Yar were brought home to me, some years later, on visiting a university colleague's house and seeing an old, faded, group photo on his bookcase. It was a portrait of his family in Ukraine. Of the eleven people depicted in the photo, only one survived Sept. 29, 1941, his mother, who had been visiting relatives in Odessa.

[abb1]

Is there any evidence that Stalin was a raging anti-semite? I doubt it.

[typekey pseudonym]

First some nitpicking: Maria wrote Of the two and three quarter million Jews in Ukraine (or an area approximating to modern day Ukraine) at the turn of the nineteenth century, only 486,000 remained in 1989. I doubt that any of the 486,000 Jews in the Ukraine were among those who were in the same area at the turn of the 19th C.

abb1 wrote, Is there any evidence that Stalin was a raging anti-semite? I doubt it. This depends on what you consider evidence. In the last few years of his life, the soviet state went specifically after artists who worked in Yiddish, and the so-called doctors' plot is understood to have been a manifestation of his anti-semitism. There are other examples, but these are the two that come easily to my mind.

[snuh]

Is there any evidence that Stalin was a raging anti-semite? I doubt it.

if the words "rootless cosmopolitans" don't mean anything to you, perhaps the words "the doctors' plot" do?

[BGoneb]

Those who were machine gunned were the lucky ones. How about those who were starved to death when the Nazis stripped out the food and sent it back to feed their own already oversized posteriors? That's to say nothing of those who were slowly starved while forced to work.

We must never forget.

[abb1]

Yes, I know about anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish campaigns of 1952-53.

But other ethnic groups (like Crimean Tatars, Ingush, Chechens, etc.) suffered even more and all nationalist movements (except Russian) were persecuted as a matter of policy.

I just don't see any reason to believe that Stalin personally was an anti-Semite, I don't think he was.

It's just a minor point, don't worry about it.

[P O'Neill]

I'm glad you brought up this issue because it seems to hard to think about Ukraine without some mention of WW2 and the Holocaust. Not that one lacks of reminders of it, but this NYT Review of Daniel Mendelsohn's book about his own relatives is very unsettling and includes one account of a savage killing in Bolechow, then Ukraine and now in Poland. And 60-65 years is really not that long ago. It's hard to see how a country can properly recover from such an experience, and some of the east-west split that you mentioned earlier must surely trace back to allegiances during WW2. If I was eastern Ukrainian, knowing what some of my western compatriots were up to during WW2, I'd wonder if we belonged in the same country.

[radek]

then Ukraine and now in Poland

You mean the other way around.

[P O'Neill]

thanks radek I had them backwards. Not good at keeping track of the historic border changes at the best of times.

[eszter]

Thanks for posting, this was very interesting to read about.

[Nick]

Cross-commented from CT - I'd strongly recommend that people read Anatoli Kuznetsov's / A Anatol's Babi Yar to find out more . . .

[anand sarwate]

I sang in Shostakovich's Symphony 13 last year -- it's titled "Babi Yar" and the text is Yevtuschenko's poem. I didn't know anything about it before and then I did some historical reading. The degree of denial is astonishing, like the Armenian genocide as well.

[Christina]

P O'Neill,

I assume you are referring to the fate of "Mrs. Grynberg" in Bolechow. The NYT review introduces a reference to the incident by saying "And if one thinks one has lost one’s capacity for horror at the depths of human nature, consider this." I could not stop myself from crying when I read it and the image will likely haunt me forever.

[P O'Neill]

Christina, I didn't excerpt the incident in the post precisely because it is so distressing -- it's 5 days after I first read it and I am still disturbed by it. I don't know how Mendelsohn managed to keep an even keel while writing the book.