Blood has no nationality
The horrible massacre that took place in late September, 1941-the greatest crime of the Nazi regime-was forever engraved in the souls of those people who were living in the Ukrainian land and present-day Ukrainians.
During those autumn days the Nazi butchers, having thoroughly prepared this outrage, launched the planned annihilation of tens of thousands of peaceful citizens. These were people of different nations - Jews (annihilated only because they were Jews), Ukrainians and Russians (annihilated for offering resistance or as representatives of “the inferior Slavic race”), Hungarians, Poles, and gypsies.
The blood of the innocent victims of Babyn Yar, a world-scale tragedy is above all human blood, which has no nationality in the higher spiritual sense. To be more precise (to be correctly understood), this was a catastrophe of all the people whose Jewish, Ukrainian, and Russian sons and daughters perished in those fearsome days in that dismal district of Kyiv. Understanding this fact is obviously more important than mere calculations of the exact number of those who were killed (historians are still arguing about the numbers: 100,000? 150, 000? Or even more?)
Thousands and tens of thousands of people who did not quite realize the terrible fate prepared for them by the Nazis were killed in the first days of the tragedy. Babyn Yar cannot be “privatized” under any single nation’s flag. It is Humanity’s pain. We have the right to say the same about the Ukrainian Holodomor catastrophe. Yet not all the parliaments of democratic states are ready to consider this event as genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Thus, the statement of one of the most influential deputies of the Israeli Knesset Michael Nudelman (a former resident of Lviv), made on the eve of the 65th anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy, is rather surprising. Nudelman thinks that the Israeli parliament is not ready yet to issue a positive resolution of the question of recognizing the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian nation.
At the same time the Knesset deputy considers this case to be a technical problem, not political. The logic of the honored deputy is not quite clear. If it is a “technical” problem, why hasn’t it been solved for so many years? One of the most authoritative antifascist figures, Viacheslav Kantor, rightly emphasized that the Babyn Yar tragedy would have been impossible if “civilized” Europe had not been silent while “innocent Jews were being annihilated in the thousands and tens of thousands in the very centre of Europe” starting from 1938-1939.
In similar fashion Europe “did not notice” the Holodomor catastrophe of 1933. Kantor says that “the final solution of the Jewish question” came, and the whole world shuddered. Thus, the blood of the hundreds of thousands of people killed in Babyn Yar, as well as the memory of the millions of Holodomor victims, appeals with a frightful persuasiveness: don’t ask for whom (which nation) the bell tolls. It tolls for you.
At the same time, one cannot omit mentioning another thing. In today’s harsh globalized world, every independent state-if it wants to remain such, not only according to formal characteristics-must firmly stand up for its national interests. This means not expecting that a foreign country will do something on your behalf if you yourself don’t make any necessary efforts. The way the Israeli authorities deliver to the remotest countries of the world the truth about the Babyn Yar tragedy cannot but impress (Israeli president Moshe Katsav’s attendance at the ceremony looks absolutely natural).
But I must add the following: our Ukrainian diplomacy should act in the same active, persistent, and aggressive way to demand that the truth about the massacres in Babyn Yar and the terror by starvation of 1932-1933 is brought to the world’s attention.
