In Memory of Babyn Yar
Bertold Brecht [1898-1956, the twentieth century’s most influential German dramatist and theoretician of the theater and poet of formidable gifts and output] wrote that the womb that bore the Nazi monster is still fertile. September 29 marked the sixtieth anniversary of a tragedy that literally shook the entire civilized world when the Nazis massacred civilian residents at Babyn Yar, a ravine in the outskirts of Kyiv, starting, of course, with the city’s Jews.
On September 30 President Leonid Kuchma, the Prime Minister Anatoly Kinakh, First Vice Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Viktor Medvedchuk, and other leaders of our state and the capital commemorated the victims of that tragedy. Leonid Kuchma laid flowers to the Monument to the Victims of Nazism at Babyn Yar, where a ceremony of laying the cornerstone for a Heritage Center Memorial was held. The center will consist of a museum of Jewish life and traditions in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, including during the Holocaust, a House of Revival of the Jewish Community, a memorial to the victims of Nazism, a park dedicated to the World’s Righteous, and a center for pedagogic research. Our leaders also unveiled a monument to the children shot in this ravine.
In the evening Ukrayina Palace hosted a requiem concert, where representatives of diplomacy, public organizations, and German Bundestag Vice President Rudolf Seiters, who has come to Ukraine with an official visit caused by the sixtieth anniversary of Babyn Yar atrocity. In his speech to those present Leonid Kuchma said, “The tragedy of Babyn Yar became an eternal part of the black chronicle of genocide. This is an extreme form of terrorism made a part of state policy...” The president stressed the need to draw conclusions from this tragedy and called to peaceful coexistence of all the world’s nations. He also pointed out that Babyn Yar tragedy is for Ukrainians, first of all, “a bitter lesson... God forbid it be repeated.”
Babyn Yar has become a symbol of crimes against humanity. 52,000 Jews were shot in the first five days beginning September 29, 1941. A number of historians convincingly argue that the actual number of victims was three times larger. The massacre went down in history of the long-suffering Jewish nation as the greatest ordeal. It is also true, however, that among the victims buried in the ravine are thousands of activists of the resistance movement of other ethnic origin: Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Czechs, and Georgians. There is no monopoly on truth, just as there is no monopoly on suffering at the hands of the fascists, to which any man, any nation can lay claim. Olena Telyha, a noted Ukrainian poetess, leader of OUN(m), and many other Ukrainian intellectuals died at Babyn Yar, along with the untold thousands of Jewish martyrs.
In 1944 Moscow’s extraordinary government commission of inquiry into Nazi war crimes issued a statement reading in part, “Over 195,000 Soviet citizens were tortured to death, shot, and poisoned in truck-mounted gas chambers in Kyiv, including: (1) over 100,000 men, women, children, and the elderly at Babyn Yar, (2) 68,000 Soviet POWs and civilian residents in Darnytsia, (3) over 25,000 Soviet civilians and POWs in the antitank ditch near the Syretsky camp and on its grounds, (4) 800 patients of St. Cyril Mental Hospital, (5) some 500 civilians on the grounds of the Kyiv Pecherska Lavra Monastery, and (6) 400 civilians at the Lukyanivka cemetery.”
A real breakthrough in elucidating that tragedy was made by Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, our compatriot, God rest his soul. He defected to Great Britain [while on a trip to London in 1969] and was branded by the Soviets as a “lackey of imperialism.” His documentary novel Babi Yar, published in 1966, was soon withdrawn from bookstores and libraries, because it showed the horrors of Nazi-occupied Kyiv and had nothing to make the reader think of the time as a period of heroic struggle. Its uncensored version was published in Kyiv in 1991.
So how is one to destroy that womb begetting Nazi-like totalitarian monsters calmly condemning to death millions of innocent humans. As early 1887, leader of the Austrian Christian Socialists (later Mayor of Vienna —Ed.) Heinrich Schoenerer shouted at rallies, “We are not just humans, we are something greater, because we are Germans!” Leave out Germans and you will have the classic formula of fascism at all times. Such characters like that (maybe Osama Bin Laden among them) launched the unprecedented terrorist attack on America, September 11, and staged all those other acts of terrorism earlier, elsewhere, including the Balkans where Serbs and Albanians were destroyed in cold blood by the Milosevic regime and US aircraft taking over so- called regulatory functions in the peace process. Thousands of people were murdered in the best traditions of totalitarianism. We will risk to predict that what drove the terrorist September 11 was not just religious fanaticism, but also fascist, totalitarian nationalism, as had been the case with Babyn Yar. This is the most terrible.
Schoenerer yelled that we Germans are more than just humans. No, we are all humans, inhabitants of the planet Earth, no matter what race or ethnic group we belong to. We are just humans. We will be saved if we realize just that.
