No monument stands over Babi Yar.

A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.

I am afraid.

Today I am as old in years

as all the Jewish people.

Now I seem to be

a Jew.

So begins Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s heart-wrenching poem Babi Yar, published in 1961.  Written to protest antisemitism, it shames communist leaders by saying their hands are “unclean” for having erased the memory of the gunning down of over 34,000 Jews by the Nazis in Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv on September 29–30, 1941.

The poem wasn’t proscribed, but censors ensured that for 22 years, it wasn’t published in any of Yevtushenko’s collections.  Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony 13, inspired by the poem, suffered a similar fate: performances faced bureaucratic interference and disruptions, and the lyrics, an interlinked collage of Yevtushenko’s poems, had to be changed off and on.

But such is the irony of how human nature and memory respond to suppression that everyone came to know Yevtushenko’s poem anyway.  And Symphony 13, which resonated deeply with audiences in the Soviet Union, came to be known as the Babyn Yar symphony.  A massacre to which even a cold memorial plaque was denied thus became enshrined in collective memory through the power of art whose creators defied an authoritarian regime.

In The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War, published in March this year, Shay A. Pilnik presents the story of that internal memorialization of the Babyn Yar massacre through literature.  For there were many other writers, too, who wrote essays, poems, stories, and other works about Babyn Yar.

In the introduction, Pilnik quotes James Young, author of a seminal study of Holocaust memorials: “The more memory comes to rest in its externalized forms, the less it is experienced internally….”  Then, speaking of the story his book tells, Pilnik says: “Ours is a story of the most effective memorial one could think of — albeit not one made out of stones, but rather of words — calling its memory-bearers to act rather than simply to recall, galvanizing a literary, social, and national movement to revolve around it.”

Babyn Yar is a grim icon of the ‘Holocaust by bullets,’ or the mass shooting down of Jews conducted by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units of the Nazis) in Eastern Europe and the western frontiers of the Soviet Union.  The Jews from the western frontier of the Soviet Union were the first group to be targeted for annihilation, well before the massive deportations of Central and Western European Jews to death camps.  In all, the Nazis killed over two million Jews in the Soviet Union.

Thus, Babyn Yar might be seen as the launching point of the Nazi plan to eliminate European Jewry.  What stands out most about it is the pace of killing: more than 34,000 Jews massacred in 35 hours.  Auschwitz, in contrast, gassed and incinerated 6,000 Jews daily.  Babyn Yar, it might be noted, was before the Nazis decided that for eliminating races that they deemed inferior, gas was more efficient than bullets.

The historiography of the massacre is complicated by the fact that Babyn Yar wasn’t a mass grave of Jews alone.  Pilnik mentions the work of Ukrainian scholar Vitalii Nakhmanovich, whose extensive research and interviews have uncovered that the first Nazi massacres in the ravine were of Russian PoWs, a week before the September 29–30 mass execution of Jews rounded up from Kyiv.  After that, the Nazis continued to execute non-Jews, Roma, captured soldiers, and others in the ravine.

So, he says, it was easy for the massacre of the Jews to be subsumed — and even blacked out — in the Soviet narrative of Babyn Yar as a site of great sacrifice made by the people of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War, which is how the Soviets refer to the June 1941–May 1945 period of World War II on the Eastern Front.

Even so, antisemitism — prevalent in the Russian empire, and very much alive in the communist regime — surely influenced the fact that little was known or written about the two million Jews killed by Nazis in the Soviet Union.  In post-Holocaust Jewish families living in the USSR, there was talk of killing fields and everyone knew vaguely about what had happened to the Jews, but speaking about it openly was taboo.  As Natan Sharansky says in the foreword, there was constant public reference to the Soviet Union’s “long, painful, bloody victory over Adolf Hitler and the Nazis,” but “we could not talk about the war against the Jews.”

The communist regime was set on amalgamating the heroic resistance of its constituent nations against the Nazi onslaught and their great sacrifices into one narrative — that of the Great Patriotic War.  To mention the specific targeting of Jews by the Nazis would fragment that narrative and foreground the enormity of Jewish suffering.  This wasn’t what the communists wanted, so documents would mention Jews far down the long list of victims of the war, way below soldiers and others.  This narrative also shielded Soviet officialdom from accusations of complicity in the killing of Jews.

Expediency dictated how Lenin, Stalin, and the communist regime viewed Jews.  Before the October Revolution, Lenin and Stalin defined Jews not as a nation but a historical remnant.  Then, during Stalin’s purges to consolidate power, ethnic minorities and political opponents, including many Jews, were relentlessly executed.  During the war years, two narratives emerged.  Because it was advantageous for the war effort, from 1942 to 1944, Stalin encouraged the expression of Jewish culture, for he sought support from the minorities and believed he could exploit Soviet Yiddish culture for propaganda.  During this period, Babyn Yar was recognized as a site of a distinctly Jewish tragedy.

Post-war, however, the Holocaust was absent from reportage, literature, and commemoration.  Antisemitism reared its head, and there was a crackdown on Jewish writers, intellectuals, and professionals.  Babyn Yar was buried.  In 1966, some Jews put up an unofficial memorial sign at Babyn Yar.  In 1972, some Jews were arrested for putting flowers on the site.  It wasn’t until 1976 that an official monument was built at the site.

But much before that, the ghosts of Babyn Yar had started populating literature, whispering to the souls of readers, stirring their conscience against the sin of forgetting.  Their voices gained strength during the period known as Khrushchev’s Thaw, when artistic freedom was encouraged to an extent, in what came to be known as the complex phenomenon of permitted dissent.  

Pilnik’s scholarly work — which took more than 10 years to write — is a deep and poignant study of that “convergence of state-imposed forgetting and defiant artistic remembering.”  Among the earliest works addressed by Pilnik are poems and other writings by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, both Jewish but writing in Russian.  Ehrenburg’s poem Babi Yar, published in 1945, creates a haunting picture of a city echoing with the cries and rattling bones of the dead that lie in the ravines.  Grossman’s chief act of memory was The Black Book, a collection of reports on the Nazi atrocities in the USSR.

One chapter is devoted entirely to the writer-journalist Viktor Nekrasov, perhaps the first writer to demand a memorial at Babyn Yar.  Despite his deep empathy for common Russians, especially peasants, his stance against authoritarianism during the Stalin era, and its return during the latter years of Khrushchev era, resulted in the revoking of his citizenship.  He died an émigré in Paris.

Besides the work of writers like Yevtushenko during Khrushchev’s Thaw years, Pilnik examines in detail works in Yiddish (the “fragile sister” tongue of Russia) and Ukrainian.  Chapters on Pilnik’s close readings of three major Yiddish works on the massacre stand out: an essay-story (published as Babyn Yar, but originally titled Among the Jews) and a story (Without Thinking, Without Calculation), both by Itsik Kipnis; and a poem (that came to be called The Babi Yar Cradle Song) by Shike Driz.  A chapter is also devoted to Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel Babi Yar, published in 1966 after his defection to England, which, along with Yevtushenko and Shostakovich’s works awakened the world to Babyn Yar.

In the current half-decade, which is seeing the rise of antisemitism – the October 7 Hamas attack and the anti-Israel sentiment on display in left-leaning circles and campuses – Pilnik’s work comes as a troubling reminder that we cannot forget what the Jews have endured.  Like the ghosts of Babyn Yar, its memory will triumph over suppression and continue to disturb human consciousness.  The ghosts will not sleep, despite Driz’s lullaby:

Help me, mothers, help me,

To wail to the end my melody.

Help me, mothers, help me,

To lull Babi Yar to sleep.

Image: Public domain.