"Babyn Yar: History and Memory" — Chapter 7
The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter was founded in 2008 with the goal of building stronger relations between Ukrainians and Jews, two peoples who, for centuries, lived side by side on the territory of what is modern-day Ukraine. Since then, in keeping with its motto, "Our stories are incomplete without each other," UJE has sponsored conferences, round-table discussions and research, as well as translations and publication of works the organization anticipates will promote a deeper understanding between the two peoples and an appreciation of their respective cultures.
We offer for the first time the book Babyn Yar: History and Memory in eBook format.
A ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv on September 29-30, 1941, was witness to one of the great atrocities of the Holocaust. There, over a two-day period, nearly 34,000 Kyiv Jews were shot to death in one of the first major events that has become known as the “Holocaust by Bullets”.
With deep compassion and understanding, a group of internationally-renowned scholars discuss the treatment of Babyn Yar in culture, music, and the arts from Stalinist times to our own. Beyond the detailed and harrowing accounts of what took place in Kyiv in late September 1941, the essays in this volume realize the importance of preserving Babyn Yar as a symbol of the Holocaust and other tragedies of the twentieth century.
Babyn Yar: History and Memory was edited by Paul Robert Magocsi, Professor Emeritus of history and political science at the University of Toronto, where from 1980 to 2025 he held the professorial Chair of Ukrainian Studies and Vladislav Hrynevych, Leading Scholar at the Kuras Institute for Political and Ethnic Studies, Ukraine.
The book (Ukrainian version) was published in conjunction with a series of events sponsored by UJE to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Babyn Yar. Published in 2016 by Dukh i Litra.
Publication of the English version (2023) was made possible by the generous support of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, Toronto, Canada. Distributed by the University of Toronto Press for the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto,
(The editors appreciate the support of the sponsor and acknowledge that the views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.)
Chapter 7
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Babyn Yar in Personal Accounts
Asia Kovrigina
...and as smoke
you shall climb to the sky
then you'll have a grave in the clouds
it is ample to lie there ...
— Paul Celan
I have come to you, Babi Yar. [...] Pleading, I stand on this soil,
If I don't go mad, I will hear you, soil —
Talk to me.
— Lev Ozerov
I have chosen these two verses for the epigraph of this chapter for several reasons. First, to show that the smoke of Auschwitz and the earth of Babyn Yar gave rise to two different images in art, hence in our memory. Second, to demonstrate that in the former Soviet Union it was impossible to write the same way as in the West.
Writing in the former Soviet Union was closely tied to politics. This was especially the case when it concerned the genocide, which was passed over in silence, and Babyn Yar, which was erased from the face of the earth. As a Jewish-Ukrainian poet living in the Soviet Union, Lev Ozerov could not write like his contemporary, the Bukovinian Jewish poet from Romania, Paul Celan. And, finally, the last reason for my choice of verses in the above epigraph is to show that there is a very fine line between literature and memoiristic writing. Both employ one and the same images. Literature is fed by memoirs, and vice versa. Moreover, poets write memoirs. These three aspects are the axes on which my reflections will revolve.
Paul Celan wrote very little prose and he left behind only poetic memoirs. He conveyed his past exclusively through poetic language that is manifestly somber, compact, and dense as black basalt. A native of Chernivtsi, he was forced into a ghetto and then sent to Romania's wartime Tabareşti labor camp. While he survived, his parents perished in camps in Transnistria. After the war Celan decided to leave communist Romania and in 1947 fled to the West, where he was eventually recognized as a major German-language poet of the twentieth century. He wrote generally about the Holocaust, but his poetry was interpreted as being focused on Auschwitz. Well versed in Russian literature, in 1962 Celan translated into German Yevgeny Yevtushenko's famous poem, "Babi Yar."
Smoke and earth: Auschwitz and Babyn Yar
Auschwitz hangs like a black sun over European culture and thought. It became a universal criterion of political thought, and stimulated the creation of art, novels, and literary criticism. The world has been branded by Auschwitz, which today is considered an "unprecedented" event that left history fractured and forced the individual to reassess the limits of reality.
Auschwitz swallowed up more than a million victims, turning them into smoke. The gas chambers produced death on a daily basis, mechanically, without leaving any waste materials. The "production of corpses" — the all-out destruction that was organized at this factory of death — became a paradigm of contemporary barbarism and an embodiment of evil in the twentieth century. Together, the inconceivable number of victims and industrial progress turned inside out, destroying instead of producing, confirmed Auschwitz in our awareness as the center of the destruction of European Jewry. For a long time Western reflections were focused precisely on the technocratic aspect of the Holocaust, to wit, the extermination of the Jews by Zyklon B, an organic compound first used as an anti-flea pesticide. From now on there would be history before and after Auschwitz; poetry before and after Auschwitz; prose writing before and after Auschwitz. Is there writing before and after Babyn Yar?
For many years Babyn Yar was overshadowed by Auschwitz. The massacre in Babyn Yar was not industrial genocide, nor a distorted mirror of technical progress. And, despite the fact that the Nazis carried out Operation 1005, the code name for the secret campaign to erase the evidence of the mass murders they had perpetrated in eastern and central Europe, and notwithstanding the Kurenivka mudslide tragedy and the continuing urban transformation in this part of Kyiv, to this day Babyn Yar has preserved the remains of the victims who perished there. The ravine is a grave. One can still visit it and bow down, as did Lev Ozerov and many others who will be discussed in this essay.
The ritual of mourning and grief on the steep slopes of Babyn Yar was described by Elie Wiesel:
A second woman was pointed out to me in the synagogue. She, too, lives in another world, but she was not among those taken out to be shot. She had managed to hide and escape. Her husband . . . . was caught and killed with the others. After the liberation, his widow somehow received a long letter he had left for her. She shut herself in her room and for three days and three nights read the letter, over and over, hundreds of times. . . Then she went to Babi Yar and called to her husband in a loud voice. The next day she did the same. Now that is all she does, every day of the year, except for Sabbaths and holidays. [1]
It is impossible to mourn Auschwitz, for it is a monster, a machine-monster. But it is possible to grieve in Babyn Yar, even if it drives one insane.
The non-technocratic nature and non-novelty of the Babyn Yar tragedy ("old-style mass murder" in the style of the execution of the Polish officers in Katyn), the subsequent imposition of Soviet censorship, the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West are all factors which explain why so few people in the West were aware of the mass killings in Babyn Yar. Much less writing was devoted to Babyn Yar than to Auschwitz, and it barely registered in the world's understanding of the Catastrophe.
Behind the Iron Curtain
We owe one of the most penetrating and poetic descriptions of Babyn Yar published in the West to Elie Wiesel. In 1965 this renowned former prisoner of Auschwitz traveled to the Soviet Union on a fact-finding mission for an Israeli newspaper. "You must go and see," he was told by the Israelis who sent him to the USSR. "You have already been a witness; now you should go and find out the way things really stand with Soviet Jews and testify on their behalf." [2] So, Wiesel went as a witness in order to find out what happened in the past and what was still happening to Jews in the Soviet Union, where they were living in the conditions of state-sanctioned antisemitism and were cut off from the rest of the world. An observant and no-nonsense traveler, Wiesel visited Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, and Tbilisi, and came home "transformed." From that time onwards, he regarded himself as an emissary of Soviet Jews. In the opening lines of his book, The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry, Wiesel wrote: "The pages that follow are the report of a witness. Nothing more and nothing else. Their purpose is to draw attention to a problem about which no one should remain unaware." [3] Wiesel's report on Soviet Jewry echoes his first book, And the World Remained Silent (1956), whose nine hundred pages are filled with detailed eyewitness testimonies of people who had survived the Nazi concentration camps. In the The Jews of Silence, Wiesel tries to explain what is happening in the Soviet Union and why not only its Jews but also their coreligionists and the entire world community remained silent about their plight. From the other side of the Iron Curtain he raised his voice in an impassioned appeal for action, publicizing the grave situation of Soviet Jewry and reminding his readers that the world was silent when the Jews were being exterminated during World War II. The journey to the Soviet Union merely confirmed Wiesel's conviction that "To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all."
A separate chapter in his book is devoted to Babyn Yar. Its first two lines read: "Kiev brings to mind Babi Yar. Kiev is Babi Yar." [4] But Wiesel does not find Babyn Yar on any map of the city, and it is not on the itinerary of any sightseeing tours. He asks a taxi driver to take him to Babyn Yar and is brought to an empty field in a suburb of Kyiv. There is nothing there, not a single marker, and it is impossible to determine if this field really is Babyn Yar. Wiesel realizes that even though Babyn Yar has disappeared and is therefore not indicated on maps or marked by a single commemorative plaque or gravestone, it is both nowhere and everywhere: "Finally the realization comes that there really is no need for you to be shown that spot. . . . The government guides are right; there is no reason to go there, there is nothing to see at Babi Yar. You can see it downtown, in every square and on every street; nothing and everything." [5]
After The Jews of Silence was published in 1966, the West could no longer remain unaware of Babyn Yar, the place where a completely different plan of extermination was employed and where tragedy was erased from maps and the face of the earth through the efforts of the Soviet government. Within a year after Wiesel's book was published, a trial began in October 1967 in the German city of Darmstadt. In the docket were former members of Einsatzgruppe 4a, which on 29 and 30 September 1941 carried out the extermination of nearly 34,000 Jews. Thanks to the publicity surrounding the Darmstadt trial, Babyn Yar entered the Western media space. Then, in 1966, Anatoly Kuznetsov burst onto the literary scene with his novel, Babi Yar.
Three years later, on 20 July 1969, during a trip to England to collect materials for another novel, Kuznetsov managed to shake off his KGB chaperone (popularly called mamka) and requested political asylum. The desperate and risky escape of one of the most brilliant, progressive, and privileged Soviet writers was a knife in the back of the Soviet authorities. Kuznetsov was roundly condemned at a meeting of the Union of Writers, and all Soviet newspapers, even those based in the most far-flung corners of the Soviet Union, joined in the campaign of persecution. Amidst the hounding, accusations, and revelations about a writer who had been read widely before this wave of persecution, Kuznetsov's critics mentioned only his conformist, socialist-realist style, and best-selling novel Prodolzhenie legendy (Sequel to a Legend, 1957), all the while utterly ignoring Babi Yar. Nevertheless, in 1966 two million copies of the magazine Yunost, which originally published the novel, were sold. [6]
Despite having been thoroughly censored, Kuznetsov's Babi Yar which had nothing novelistic about it, had the effect of a bombshell. In the Soviet Union, where there was no free press and no freedom of expression, literary texts played a preeminent social and political role, and it may be argued that in no other society was literature the object of such keen public attention. Totalitarian systems established special relationships with art, whose creative results were used for propaganda purposes. Soviet literary texts are marked both by traces of state violence and, most often, the traces of efforts to evade it. History thus invades the very heart of art. Like the Soviet press, literature was constantly subjected to the manipulations of censorship, which sculpted a text into an instrument of propaganda. At the same time, literature generated immense interest among readers who were on a perpetual quest for "truth." Literature was the place to be. It was the ringside seat where a face-to-face encounter took place between the government and Soviet citizens who had learned how to dodge the direct blows of censorship and read between the lines.
Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, cut down by approximately one-third of its original length by Soviet censors, was read precisely this way: between the lines. Therefore, the taboo that was placed on the novel after the author's defection in 1969, its confiscation from libraries, and its expungement from history cost Soviet collective memory of Babyn Yar dearly. This work, so fundamental to Soviet literature and journalism, was kept out of the public eye until the collapse of the Soviet Union, that is, for more than twenty years. Of course, it was not the censored version of Kuznetsov's novel that was circulated in samizdat. It is problematic, however, even to compare the print run of this secretly circulated work with the print runs of publishing houses that had published this leading Soviet writer prior to his defection.
Kuznetsov left the Soviet Union precisely for the sake of Babi Yar, sewing photographic film containing the unabridged version of his novel into the lining of his light coat. He was convinced that he should publish the novel, the major work of his life, in its complete form, without any distortions.
Censored versions of Babi Yar very soon appeared in the West. The English translation was published in New York by The Dial Press, known for its many publications on eastern Europe. The translator Jacob Guralsky, through no fault of his own, misconstrued the innovative nature of the genre proposed by Kuznetsov. For example, the foreword, in which the author explained the meaning of the phrase "document in the form of a novel," was removed by censors from the Soviet edition. Using the Soviet censored version for his translation, Guralsky gave Babi Yar the subtitle, "a documentary novel." [7] What is more, the American edition was illustrated in the Socialist Realist style, which was absolutely at odds with the tone of the book.
A French translation of the censored version of Kuznetsov's work was published in Paris by Français Réunis, a publishing house controlled by France's Communist party. [8] The book did not enjoy great success because even the pro-Soviet reading public was struck by the oddity of the novel, mangled by censorship, while anti-Soviet readers were loath even to look at the book. This was, after all, a time when the Iron Curtain divided space into socialist and capitalist spheres which were not just geographic; mentally it separated the free West from the enchained East.
Testimonies about the catastrophe and belles lettres
The Western public heard about Kuznetsov because of his "non-return." On 8 August 1969, Time magazine published a three-page article about him, comparing his sensational defection to the West with the defection of Stalin's daughter just two years earlier. The article mentions Babi Yar only in passing as a book that "recounts the Nazi massacre of thousands of Russian Jews outside the author's native [city of] Kyiv and implies that many Russians were not displeased to see the Jews gone." [9] Kuznetsov attracted the West's attention more as an unexpected dissident who was exposing repressions on the other side of the Iron Curtain than as a direct eyewitness who had survived the occupation of Kyiv.
In August 1969 the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph published an interview that Kuznetsov gave to David Floyd, a well-known London journalist, Slavist, and future translator of a new version of Babi Yar. [10] In the interview Kuznetsov made an open and naive admission about his links with the KGB and how he had been recruited by the Soviet secret police and agreed to cooperate with the Soviet secret police in order to be allowed to travel abroad. After this admission, a considerable number of people who had welcomed Kuznetsov with open arms turned away from him in disgust.
Today, with all the available historical research and testimonies about the Soviet period, we understand that reality was never so clear-cut. But in the late 1960s it was difficult for the public to distinguish between victim and denouncer. Notions of black and white would finally merge, on the border, into an indistinct gray zone, where moral principles are forcibly erased or completely absent. Thus, in 1970, when Kuznetsov published his polyphonic work, now titled Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, under his new, "free" name of A. Anatoli, [11] far less attention was paid to it than to the infamous 1969 interview in London's Sunday Telegraph.
Why do I use the word "polyphonic"? Because three voices coexist in this novel: the voice of a Soviet writer who, regardless of state anti-Semitism, decided to write about Babyn Yar (this text appears in an ordinary font); the voice of censorship, which gutted the novel and custom-fit it to the official version of history (this text appears in italics); and the voice of an author living in liberty in the West (this text appears within square brackets). This is a trio of voices that often sound harmonious. Kuznetsov was the first writer to employ the italics-stratagem in order to permit a multilevel reading of the novel, reveal the traces of state violence within a literary text, and create a political palimpsest. The glasnost period of the late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed the phenomenon of the "return" of literature formerly banned in the Soviet Union, which was then on the point of collapse. The multiple-font scheme is also present in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, to be discussed below.
In England Kuznetsov obtained access to works that had never been published in the Soviet Union. Comprehending how the twentieth century had changed literature, and coming to grips with the naive soap bubble in which Soviet literature was forced to exist, Kuznetsov came to the realization that he was not, after all, a writer. Therefore he did not write anything while in emigration. In 1979, two months before his fiftieth birthday and before his premature death, he declared: "Now that I have read real [books], I have realized that I have no reason to sully paper." [12] For him, "real" works were written by the likes of Proust and Kafka, Borges and Faulkner. Therefore, he, Kuznetsov, was no writer; he was a witness, or, to be more precise, a witness who became a writer in order to bear testimony.
The twentieth century gave rise to a new type of literature, or anti-literature. This was literary testimony; testimony that has a literary character, a literary idea. And although the social practice of testifying through writing was born in the trenches of World War I and during the Armenian genocide, the real impetus for the development of this type of writing was given by the deportations of European Jews to Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust. After the barbed wire surrounding Auschwitz was dismantled, three different but active figures appeared on the Western historical landscape: the Survivor, the Witness, and the Witness Who Became a Writer.
The Survivor tries to return and to adapt to a normal life, and sometimes — to forget everything and to be forgotten. By contrast, the Witness takes the word and heads for the podium in order to recount how he/she survived and to talk about those who did not. Finally, the Witness/Writer seeks to convey through literature what he/she has seen behind the barbed wire. Literary testimony seeks to express a situation that by its degree of brutality cannot be expressed, to give voice to it, to recreate it, and to enroot it in reality. When the language with which it became possible to describe the genocide emerged, the horror emerged as well.
Immediately after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, newspapers were flooded with texts written by witnesses. For example, over 140 memoirs of former prisoners were published in France between 1945 and 1948. For the most part, these were fact-based texts offering a straightforward, non-metaphorical description of the mechanism governing the concentration camp in action. They served as sources for historians and prepared society for the reception of texts written by writers acting as witnesses and of literature about the Holocaust, whose emergence required time and a text's artistic maturation.
The precursors of literary testimony are memoirs and diaries. However, a new dimension appeared in twentieth-century literary testimonies, which was not present in nineteenth-century memoirs. Owing to its narrative model, literary testimony is closer to a judicial act, somewhat like a speech before a court, than it is to the novelistic model of belles lettres. The goal of the "judicial act" that these witnesses employ lies in writing and publishing a detailed account of the extreme brutality of history to which they were witness and presenting it to the court of public opinion. They are driven by the thirst and imperative to tell their stories. And even if these texts cannot be attached to a set of written criminal charges, they are designed to ensure that the court of history will take place one day.
Therefore, literary testimony is characterized by a special type of narrative as well as by an author's own and inalienable experience and degree of inclusion in the described event. The genre affiliation of literary testimony is often declared by an author on a boundary level, and the text is created on the border of one genre overlapping into another. This attests to the author's experimental quest that underscores the ambivalent affiliation of the text with literature. Peter Weiss, author of the play The Investigation: Oratorio in 11 Cantos (1965), defines his work as "documentary theater." Kuznetsov accomplishes a similar quest for genre affiliation, the result of which is his "document in the form of a novel."
In the Soviet Union, Kuznetsov worked in conditions where thought was fettered and in complete isolation from the process that was taking place in Western literature "after Auschwitz." Nevertheless, he was able to create one of the first literary testimonies in the fullest sense of this term. He intuited the many specific features of this genre, including the role of literature in the transmission of a document. He proposed a document that was created with the aid of literature.
Kuznetsov was not in the ravine in Kyiv and, therefore, only an indirect witness of the genocide against the Jews. His work, however, blends a first-person account with the accounts of those who survived Babyn Yar. The Holocaust is conveyed from various positions, and its various stages are recreated. The Babyn Yar massacre is viewed through the perception of the author-witness Kuznetsov, but the actual shootings are recounted by Dina Pronicheva and the functioning of the Syrets concentration camp and efforts to destroy the traces of the Babyn Yar massacre are described by Volodymyr Davydov. Kuznetsov fills in the gaps in his knowledge by inserting testimonies and documents into the novel.
Kuznetsov's novel is fully sustained within the discourse of eyewitness testimonies. Written in the first person, it is "I" who recounts the story and also offers readers an opportunity to hear a polyphony of voices. Furthermore, the author himself emphasizes the importance of testimony, constructing his novel to resemble a speech in court: "I am writing it as though I were giving evidence under oath in the very highest court . . ." [13] In the paragraphs in which he addresses the reader, we seem to sense the author's gestures on a physical level. This is very intuitive and non-literary writing, a type of narrative born out of an absolute impasse. Hence the intrusive and constant emphasis on credibility, a quality that did not exist in Soviet literature.
The Black Book: a document that became literature
In 1943 Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the most influential Soviet writers during World War II, began working in collaboration with Vasilii Grossman on The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry. [14] The idea to write this book that recounts the catastrophe that befell Soviet Jews through the voices of witnesses — both those who survived and those who perished — was Ehrenburg's. It probably came to him when Albert Einstein suggested that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee compile a commemorative book about the Nazi destruction of the Jews and publish it in many languages. Like the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, created with Stalin's permission at the beginning of 1942 in order to convince its "Jewish brothers in the entire world" to come to the Soviet Union's assistance, Ehrenberg's book project initially received the Communist party leadership's approval. The literary commission overseeing the Soviet Black Book included a considerable number of well-known writers. Their task was to edit testimonies written by people who had either survived or were direct eyewitnesses of the Holocaust, as well as testimonies sent from the various places that were affected by the hurricane of genocide.
It is still a mystery who came up with the title of the book. In any case, the project is not the only "black book" in existence. A Romanian publication, Cartea Neagra — Holocaust in Romania, and its Polish counterpart, The Black Book of Polish Jewry, were compiled at the same time as the Soviet book project. [15] The Holocaust gave rise not only to a new kind of writing but also a new type of compilation. The phenomenon of "black books" continued to spread throughout the world during the second half of the twentieth century. [16]
The destruction of the Jews on Soviet territory also sparked a flood of testimonies, although their numbers did not compare to the volume produced in the West. Nevertheless, a large number of texts were written in the Soviet Union both during the Holocaust and immediately after the war ended. Their authors were people who had never before been tempted to take up their pens. Most of these texts belong to the factographic genre (diaries, letters, ghetto chronicles). Among them are poems, songs, and descriptive accounts, that is, works that display a pronounced tendency toward literature.
The testimonies that appeared during and immediately after the Holocaust is explained, in addition to the need to express oneself and give voice to pain, by Jewish religious culture, which requires that the memory of the Jewish people be preserved. In Judaism's sacred texts the Hebrew word zakar (remember) is an absolute commandment to preserve the memory of the Jewish people, who are in danger of extermination. The secularization of this tradition became noticeable already during the pogroms that swept through the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That was a time when the poets S. An-sky and Perets Markish appealed to writers to preserve the Jewish world with the aid of written testimonies. Therefore, when the Holocaust began and when it was impossible to preserve life, the imperative "to record" and preserve memory became paramount. Before he was shot in a ravine near Riga in December 1941, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow implored his friends to not forget and to write down their own stories.
But unlike Western witnesses who, upon returning from the camps, talked about Auschwitz openly and widely, Soviet witnesses were denied the right to testify publicly. The silence surrounding the genocide, as well as the repressions that targeted Soviet Jews during the period of postwar anti-Semitism, stripped them of the opportunity to publish their testimonies. Then, in keeping with an old Russian tradition, witnesses began writing to authors, whom they regarded as patrons and defenders of a downtrodden people. The largest number of letters containing testimonies were sent to Ilya Ehrenburg, whose table was literally covered with envelopes.
In the Soviet Union, a witness was forced to have a witness; in other words, there had to be a person who was narrating (the witness) and the one who was recording and then publishing (a writer). In the conditions of Soviet totalitarianism this kind of collaboration was mandatory. Since Holocaust survivors were denied the right to bear testimony openly and in full voice, writers felt a responsibility to convey the witness's painful experience in their own words by capitalizing on their popularity. The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is an illustrative example of this kind of collaboration between the witness and the writer.
Toward the end of the war, when Ehrenburg was compiling material, he had few testimonies specifically about Babyn Yar. Most of what he eventually published were obtained later in 1945, thanks in no small part to the Research Center of Jewish Culture in Kyiv, which was collecting testimonies about the Babyn Yar massacre.
In October 1944, during a meeting of the literary commission, Ehrenburg expressed concern that there was no text about the infamous "ravine of death." "Of the great tragic cities, Kyiv is missing in the first volume. . . . It is a crying shame that the city which acquired symbolic importance will not be in the first volume, but Kyiv might be done only if someone can travel there." [17] Shortly after the commission's meeting, Ehrenburg came across Lev Ozerov and convinced him to go to his native city Kyiv and write a text about Babyn Yar.
After arriving in Kyiv, Ozerov first had to suppress his pain and control his emotions because he had lost family members in Babyn Yar. Many years later Ozerov recalled his wartime visit to Babyn Yar:
I saw a ditch. Not all the bodies had been burned, not all the bones had been ground into dust. We could not speak. A scene out of Dante. A sense of catastrophe, destruction hung in the air. Eventually I found out all the details. . . . I questioned people who had been in hiding; very few of them are left. . . . But I especially looked for people who had managed to crawl out of the ravine from underneath a pile of bodies and not be killed by the Germans, who were checking to see if any people were still alive in the ravine. It was very difficult to write. Among those who perished were many people from my family. . . . It was difficult for those people who saved themselves to tell me everything; in recounting, they relived something that was unendurable. Literary talent was not adequate for this account; one had to be capable of sensing the movements of the human soul in these extreme conditions. I decided to stick to the facts. [18]
Thus, Ozerov decided intentionally to create a journalistic document about Babyn Yar, and to express his "I" in poetry. The text, placed at the outset of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, has no author, because he has been erased or killed: "Old men and women walked along supporting each other. Mothers carried their infants in their arms or pushed them in baby carriages. People were carrying sacks, bundles, suitcases, and boxes. Children plodded along with their parents. Young people brought nothing with them. . . . The city fell silent." [19] The silence is maintained not just by the city. Its residents are silent, we do not hear their sighs or their sobs; we do not even hear the shooting going on in the ravine. Before us is a silent film; a reel of film turns on the projector, there is a constant change of frames, in which the same heroes are repeated but in various settings. The settings are truth, the reel is a documentary.
The first phrase/subtitle is short and self-contained: "German troops entered Kyiv on 19 September." [20] It appears against a gray background; it needs no illustration. The creaking of the movie projector; the first frame is a general long shot, without a close-up, of the looting and beatings taking place at the Bessarabka marketplace. In the second frame Nesia Elgort opens the doors of her apartment in a building located at 40 Saksahanskyi Street, and the beseeching glances of her entire large family are aimed at her. Elgort is one of the characters who is seen throughout the reel: remember her. Two days are skipped over. The third frame is 21 September. Nesia's father is taken away and she goes off to find him. The reel speeds up; from now on the frames are monotonous in their horror: a German commandant; insults; Jews being forced to dance; Jews who are falling down; Jews being beaten. On 22 September the explosions on Khreshchatyk Boulevard are in the background; in the foreground a German is running; he makes a slicing motion across his neck: "Partisans and Jews — Kaput." [21]
One could continue breaking down into frames Ozerov's entire text, which is fully sustained in this severe, cinematic-photographic style. It consists of gestures and clearly thought-out scenes. On the fifth day after the Germans' arrival in Kyiv, a Jew named Liberman appears in the frame. Hoping to save himself, he is pretending to be a Karaite named Libermanov. We are witness to his arrest and release, and then plunged into the epicenter of the explosions going off on Khreshchatyk Boulevard. We see smoke and fire, this time much closer. In the last frame of this fragment, we look, through Liberman's eyes, at a "scrap of blue sky" from inside a shelter fashioned by his wife: "In the evenings the sky was tinged with the crimson reflection of a gigantic fire. Put to the torch the Khreshchatyk was ablaze for six days." [22]
The second phrase/subtitle, which begins the next sequence, is an announcement to "the Jews of the city of Kyiv and [surrounding] vicinities." From now on it is difficult to keep track of the characters, as one is replaced by another. One of the many who perish in Babyn Yar is the composer Chaim Yampolsky; a violin and a conductor's baton appear briefly in the foreground. The maestro is led right out of a rehearsal. There is no music. Short, stabbing phrases break off the existence of people even before we have a chance to get a good look at them.
The third sequence is the murky dawn of 29 September. Amidst the flow of people, for a second we spot Nesia Elgort; it is a blurred, distant frame. Then Nesia reappears in a close-up. She is not wearing any clothes now; she is pressing her son Iliushka to her and moving toward the edge of the ravine, and then . . .
Writers and artists will spend a long time reflecting on how to recreate what came next. This dispute over creative devices for depicting mass death and fashioning pathos-filled descriptions of pre-death erotica continues to trouble critics. Annette Wieviorka, the French historian of the Holocaust, was the first to write about the flow of testimonies following the genocide: "What comes next — there is nothing to say and practically nothing to write about. Not because of some difficulty or lack of literary talent or lack of words. Hereinafter is only a mass of people who are dying from suffocation by gas, who are then either buried or burned. Any account, whether literary or historical, involves development within time. Here time does not exist. . . . Here it lies in the repetition of quasi-'industrial' gestures that convey what cannot be conveyed. . . ." [23]
Ozerov had no time to reflect on how to depict what came next; he needed to write. The fundamental difference between literature and journalism lies precisely in the time dimension. Literature is aimed at the future; before it lies eternity. Journalism is aimed at the present time.
There is an obvious difference between urgent pressing testimony and testimony that is left for the future, for the next generations. Special, unconditional urgency is characteristic precisely of documentary, factographic testimony that must be brought to the immediate attention of the reader or listener. Literary testimony can also possess this urgency, but besides this, the interlocutor of literary testimony is found in the absolute future. A literary text has immortality in order to make an impression. Eternity is literature's time. Accordingly, a fundamental difference exists between the need to bear testimony (to transmit to others one's extreme experience of surviving in a historical cataclysm) and the desire to create a literary text.
The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, which began as a journalistic project, became a collection of "people's documents" and was slated for immediate publication. Its compilers, Ehrenburg and Grossman, realized that the Soviet authorities were deliberately suppressing information about the Holocaust of European Jewry. Once the book was released, they hoped to use it as a counterpoise to the outbreak of antisemitism that was rising to appalling heights in the Soviet Union. Yet, their hope of seeing the book in print began to evaporate almost immediately. Already in 1945 Ehrenburg abandoned the project, while his collaborators who continued working on the manuscript were aware that the book would not be published any time soon. At the same time they were cognizant of the fact that the book did not belong to the present time but to eternity. In 1948 the galleys of The Complete Book of Russian Jewry were destroyed, the archives were sequestered, and soon a considerable number of writers were arrested.
In my view, The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry belongs not just to history but also to literature, and in this way it differs from its Polish and Romanian counterparts. The collaboration of writers on the Soviet publication, the repressions to which they were subjected, the several layers of censorship that were applied to the testimonies, and the metaphorical survival of the book make it a literary work rather than a collection of fact-based testimonies.
Annette Wieviorka's remark about time frozen in the epicenter of destruction, the absence of developing action, and, as a result, the impossibility of conveying the Holocaust through an artistic storyline pertains specifically to Auschwitz. In a gas chamber there is no time, and the people who survived are absent. In Babyn Yar there is time, and what happens next is conveyed by some heroes in Ozerov's unsigned text that opens the Soviet Black Book.
In that text Ozerov introduces the account of Olena Borodianska-Knysh, who escaped from the ravine with her four-year-old daughter. The account is brief but memorable for its happy ending. After crawling out of Babyn Yar, Olena moistens the lips of her dead daughter with dew, and she comes back to life. Many years later, in 1991, Liudmyla Borodianska wrote a testimony about Babyn Yar and the war. From this text we learn some details about her mother, Olena Borodianska, about whom we learn nothing from Ozerov's text except for her name and the complex trajectory of her survival after escaping from Babyn Yar.
The shootings in Babyn Yar were only the first in an endless string of trials and tribulations that included denunciations, flight, and survival. In testimonies, particularly those written after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Babyn Yar shootings themselves most often occupy a vivid, morbid, but comparatively insignificant place. These texts resound with echoes of the pogroms, the Great Famine (Holodomor) of the early 1930s, and the Stalinist repressions. Layered over Babyn Yar are the horrors of the war and betrayal at the hands of trusted people and neighbors. The fear experienced during the period of postwar antisemitism rings out like a concluding chord.
In Borodianska's testimony all the lines of twentieth-century Soviet history intersect fantastically (and within the parameters of a single individual's life) and ominously. Before us is an intricate story unfolding over time, which is primed for a creative account. Liudmyla's mother was an elementary school teacher, and her father was a soldier. Her father was shot in 1937, during the Great Terror. Liudmyla has only a vague recollection of the first year of the war, since she was barely five years old. Her testimony is a calm, even-handed account of what she was told later about the war. But in the most dramatic moments, the child's confused awareness breaks into this serene account. The text quickens. One can feel breathing or even shortness of breath:
Then I heard a woman's hysterical screaming. They were taking her fifteen-year-old daughter from her, but she was not giving her up; then they hit her with a buttstock, they probably killed her, and the Germans stripped her daughter and dragged her off somewhere. I became very frightened then and began pressing closer to mother. . . . Then I saw a German with a folding knife approaching an old man, he said something to him, then he grabbed him by the beard, and with all his strength began pulling him by the beard. The old man started yelling loudly, blood poured down his face, and the beard was left in the fascist's hands. Seeing this, I began to scream and cry, asking my mother to leave this bad place, where aunty and grandpa are being killed and we might be killed. Then they began rounding us up, and like a herd, we were driven ever closer to the precipice. It was already dark outside, and projectors were blazing all around. [24]
After little Liudmyla's sudden burst of awareness, once again we plunge into her equable account of spending several days in a cellar before being rescued by her mother's friend, Valia Litoshenko, who lived near Babyn Yar next to Saint Cyril's Church. Here the narrative is intersected by a new line that brings us to the future, the year 1961, when Litoshenko dies in the Kurenivka mudslide, her house swallowed up by the debris flowing down the steep hill from Syrets. Next comes a succinct description of a number of rescues, encounters with good people and evil ones, Ukrainian songs, and roundups of people who are sent to Germany to work as slave laborers. Suddenly, there is another projection into the future. During the Chornobyl nuclear accident Olena Borodianska, who was born in the village of Varovychi, finds herself in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone until the entire family is resettled.
The text concludes with another vivid burst of childhood memories, in which the Germans bring Liudmyla's mother into a church, which they nail shut with boards and then douse with gas:
I ran after them, shoeless, wearing only a shirt. I wanted to be with mama. But I didn't see her anywhere. And people were being led into the church that was secured on all sides by the Germans. They did not let me come closer. In my way stood a German, I remember him even today; he was so young. He looked both ways (to see if anyone was looking), tossed a candy to me (which consisted of slices). I took it. I'm standing in front of him and crying. I beg him to let me go to my mother, but he chases me away from the church. [25]
By some miracle, the mother Olena Borodianska survives, because, at the last minute, hostages were released from the church. In describing these events fifty years later, her daughter says that it is difficult for her to recall them and write about them, and her narrative breaks off here.
"Me" in the face of history
Testimonies and memoirs often conclude, not with an admission of the narrator's fear of the past and helplessness when confronted by a blank piece of paper, but with words about how important it is for a survivor finally to enter the category of witness and leave his or her first-person account. Becoming a witness means finding one's voice and understanding one's "me" in history.
The detailed memoirs of Zakhar Trubakov begin and end with an emphasis on the paramount importance of finally writing and publishing that which could not be published earlier. Whereas Liudmyla Borodianska wrote her testimony at the request of the Ukrainian historian Borys Zabarko, it was Trubakov's decision to write about his experiences, although after an interval of fifty years.
A former prisoner of the Syrets concentration camp and member of Operation 1005, whose task was to exhume and burn the corpses of Babyn Yar, Trubakov recorded the main facts while his memory was still fresh, immediately after the liberation of Kyiv. Later he became friends with Anatoly Kuznetsov, who convinced Trubakov of the crucial need to describe everything that he had witnessed. By the time Kuznetsov's Babi Yar was published, the former concentration camp prisoner Trubakov knew that at the very first opportunity he would supplement the information and publish his notes. The opportunity arose only in 1990s, after he immigrated to Israel and began working on his autobiography. And even though he called his work a novel, Taina Babego Yara (The Secret of Babyn Yar), it is unquestionably the autobiography of a witness. [26] This is because Trubakov not only places events in their historical context, but also describes his experiences as a person that encountered the brutality of history.
At the heart of his story is not Babyn Yar but the authorial "me", torn and broken by Babyn Yar. Trubakov does not begin his account in September 1941, when the Germans entered Kyiv, but with a description of his childhood, youth, and married life. This is a personal and rather self-referential work. The word "Secret" is part of the title not only because Operation 1005 was supposed to turn the Babyn Yar massacre into a secret, but also because for the rest of the author's life the secret of what took place in the ravine in Kyiv continued to maim his life. His book is a depressing, painful, and belated confession of all the events that took place in the Syrets concentration camp. The executions, gallows, stench of corpses, and escape are refracted through the prism of the author's awareness and memory.
The narrator emerges with all his human frailties and unheroic fears. Nevertheless, despite the author's all too obvious desire to create a purely personal narrative, the reader senses some kind of unconscious "coding of suffering," and the softened descriptions, characterized by the Soviet style and Newspeak, are unmistakable. Suffering and the authorial "me" have been forced out of the book by Soviet clichés. It is clear that Zakhar Trubakov did not possess an adequate verbal palette or tools to convey a new self-awareness born of the Holocaust and World War II. A different language, other than that of the Soviets created to describe the happy socialist future, is necessary for recounting horrific death and stomach-turning survival. What is required is language that is maimed.
Autobiographical writing was not intrinsic to Russian and Eastern European culture, but rather was a product of the West's culture of individualism. In the 1930s, after the introduction of Socialist Realism, autobiography became the most disgraced genre in the Soviet Union. It was considered a bourgeois relic that overemphasized the moral worth of the individual and psychoanalytical self-discovery. Totalitarianism banned psychoanalysis and placed a ban on talking about one's "me" as a separate persona. Autobiographies would be supplanted by accusatory collective meetings focused on expulsions from the Communist party, while personal history would be supplanted by general history. A careful reading of The Complete Book of Russian Jewry reveals that it does not contain profound personal histories but moves continuously from personal catastrophe to historical catastrophe. The only thing left of the witness, as in the case of Olena Borodianska in Ozerov's essay, is a name and a brief account of survival. From the very outset, Soviet authors rejected desperate, personal testimonies that sounded like shouts, in which one can hear the rudiments of a "verbal spasm," to recall the words of the Bukovinian Jewish poet Paul Celan.
The testimony of Ida Belozovska was stored in the archives of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. She did not go to Babyn Yar but was hidden by her Russian husband. Her entire family perished in Babyn Yar: mother, father, nieces, and nephews. She knew that they would be killed, but she was powerless to save them. Her five-page text is one sustained, confusing account of inner struggle, self-accusations, nightmares, and the constant desire to stop living — to disappear. The following are fragments of her text not included in Ehrenburg and Grossman's Black Book: "I felt a strong desire to sprinkle my head, my whole self with ashes, to hear nothing, to be changed into dust. . . . What should I do? Why should I live? Have I got the right to live while those around me, who mean the most to me, have to die such a horrible, violent death? . . . I was buried, I no longer existed, I had disappeared from among the living." [27]
Soviet witnesses were not permitted to suffer, to describe experiences connected with physicality (pain, hunger, cold), or to expound on these questions that are so characteristic of people who have survived historical cataclysms. From the standpoint of Soviet ideology, experiences that presented an individual's unheroic conduct during the war were untypical and disgraceful, and thus under a strict taboo. Death was depicted as sacrifice, illness as a trial, and physicality was either absent or the body streamed with myrrh, like Christian relics. The official Soviet discourse sought to propel positive characters to the foreground; it demanded the transmission of an exclusively constructive message and abstention from the tragic. The principles and aspirations to create such a description of the Holocaust are in absolute contradiction to the essence and substance of the act of bearing testimony, which is always spontaneous and impulsive, reflects the destruction and death of the "Me", and portrays the loss of all that is human, as well as horrific death.
Western testimonies written by survivors of Auschwitz are distinguished by their specific narrative mode. The survivor, switching throughout his or her account from "Me" to "We", seeks to recount everything on behalf of everyone. In the text, s/he talks not only in his/her own name but also in the name of those who did not return, who did not survive. Prisoners of concentration camps and ghettos knew that someone had to return in order to bear witness and to say "We" on behalf of those who can no longer speak. For example, the three-act tragedy written by the former prisoner of Auschwitz Charlotte Delbo is entitled Qui rapportera ces paroles? (Who Will Carry Forth These Words?). But those who survived Babyn Yar encountered a different "We", one that was grand and patriotic, and imposed by Soviet literature and the official discourse. This heroic "We", the victors, imposed by the Soviet state, supplanted the individual voices of victims who remained tormented by questions and feelings of guilt.
In the Soviet Union, the "We" that survived or disappeared in the ravine could not break through the official vision of history; it was proclaimed as uninteresting for the future. The prohibition against people bearing witness and the loss of the right to express one's tragic voice precluded the transformation of the survivor into a witness, and the witness into a writer. "We", which had a sincere desire to bear testimony and might have emerged (something clearly evident in the texts sent to the compilers of The Complete Book of Russian Jewry) was crushed by propaganda and Soviet epic literature. These texts were not read or used. For decades, the weak voices recounting, through their "Me", the horrible death that befell "We" remained buried in the archives. The amputation of the role of witness took place in Soviet society. Thanks to its very non-Soviet narrative, "confessionality," and physicality, Kuznetsov's novel won the admiration of Soviet readers. Ultimately, the Soviet censor, who whitewashed passages about collaborationism, the Holodomor, and the Great Terror, was unable to eliminate the "Me" crushed by history from the novel.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, alongside the political movements of perestroika and glasnost, the Soviet Union experienced an awakening of historical awareness and thus finally entered the era of the witness. Soviet society began coming out actively against ideology and demanding the demystification of history. It turns out that nothing had been forgotten, and testimony as a personal document finally found its true worth. The collapse of the Soviet Union was essential to the emergence of testimony that recounts the collapse of "Me" in the twentieth century.
NOTES
[1] Elie Wiesel, The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 36.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., p. vii.
[4] Ibid., p. 33.
[5] bid., p. 33-34.
[6] After its appearance in installments in the Moscow journal Iunost', the novel was published separately: Anatolii Kuznetsov, Babii Iar: roman dokument (Moscow: Izd-vo Moloddaia Gvardiia, 1967).
[7] Anatoly Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Documentary Novel, translated by Jacob Guralsky (New York: Dial Press, 1967).
[8] Anatoly Kouznetzof, Babi Yar, translated by André Robel (Paris: Editeurs Français Réunis, 1967).
[9] A. Anatoli, "I Could No Longer Breathe", interview in Time (New York), 8 August 1969, p. 30.
[10] David Floyd, "Anatoly Kouznetsov: Interview," The Sunday Telegraph (London), 16 August 1969.
[11] A. Anatoli (Kuznetsov), Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970).
[12] A. Anatoli, "Anatoly Kuznetsov, Wrote Babi Yar," The Washington Post (Washington, D.C.), 15 June 1979, p. 14.
[13] Anatolii Kuznetsov, Babii Iar: roman-dokument (Moscow, 2014), p. 39.
[14] Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, eds., The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, translated by David Patterson (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003).
[15] Matatias Carp, ed. Cartea Negra—Holocaust in Romania: Facts and Documents on the Annihilation of Romania's Jews, 1940-1944, translated by Sean Murphy (Safety Harbor, FL: Simon Publications, 2001); Jacob Apenszlak, ed., The Black Book of Polish Jewry: An Account of the Martyrdom of Polish Jewry Under the Nazi Occupation (New York: Roy Publishers, 1943).
[16] Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1999), translated from the original French edition: Le livre noir du Communisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997).
[17] Transcript of a meeting of the literary commission, 13 October 1944, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rosiiskoi Federatsii, Fond 8114, Opis 1, Delo 912, List 8.
[18] Lev Ozerov, "Pourquoi vous jetez du sable sur mes yeux?", interview in Liberation (Paris), 16 November 1995.
[19] Lev Ozerov, "Babi Yar," in Ehrenburg and Grossman, Complete Black Book, p. 7.
[20] Ibid., p. 3.
[21] Ibid., p. 3.
[22] Ibid., p. 5.
[23] Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide: entre la mémoire et l'oubli (Paris: Hachette "Pluriel", 2003), p. 123.
[24] Liudmyla Borodianska, " Mesto smerti — Babyn Yar," in Boris Zabarko, ed., Zhizn' i smert' v epokhu Kholokosta: svidetel' stva i dokumenty, Vol. I (Kyiv, 2008), p. 184.
[25] Ibid., p. 191.
[26] Zakhar Trubakov, Taina Bab'ego Iara (Tel Aviv: Izd-vo Krugozor, 1997).
[27] Ida Belozovska, "My Life in the Occupied Kiev," in Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, eds., The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington, IN, 2008), pp. 53–59.
