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Trickling memory
The fascists shot 34,000 Jews in Kyiv 70 years ago
Kiev, September 28. The sun-drenched park, the hilly country. The grandmothers are kneeling before their grandchildren, young couples are sitting on the benches, there are empty vodka bottles in the bushes and the suburbs in the background – this is Babiy Yar in Kyiv.
This is not true to say that nobody here does not remember that Holocaust reached its first peak here seventy years ago; there are still several monuments here. One can see a man-high bronze Menorah on the clearing, although there is no directing sign at Dorogozhichi underground station pointing to the winding road to it. One should know how to get there: first, pass the TV tower, then, pass building No.44 and go left through the narrow passageway and you are on site. Although there is no description board, there is the park employee trimming the bushes. The children are scootering.
Seventy years ago exactly, on September 29-30, 1941, the German soldiers and policemen killed almost 34,000 people here.
Most of them were Kyiv Jews. The victims were forced to undress and then within the two days they were shot with automatic guns in the ravine uptown (now this is a recreational park in the outskirts). Later the criminals blew up the ravine slopes to bury the dead. This slaughter was committed several months after the war against the Soviet Union began and was the start of Jewish holocaust in Ukraine. According to modern estimates, the victims of the German occupation that ended in 1944 number nearly 1,5 million people. So, Ukraine was the major place of Holocaust – second to Poland, the country were Nazi built the death camps.
But, the memory of Shoa has faded out in Ukraine. When Ukraine was a component of the Soviet Union, the ideological aim was to count the killed Jews along with the killed soldiers, partisans and civilian population in the total number of Soviet victims. No separate memory of Holocaust was allowed. Therefore, the public conscience hardly reflects a special nature of the Jews destruction. Yushchenko, a previous President, honored the Babiy Yar monument with his presence at 65th anniversary in 2006, however, experts such as Boris Zabarko, the Chairman of Ukrainian Jewish Association of the Holocaust Survivals, complain that Ukrainian leaders – now the President Yanukovych team – has expressed almost no interest to the topic. Instead of this, they made several attempts to accent Holodomor - the Stalin-made artificial famine of 1932-1933 that took away millions of lives – as “the national tragedy”. According to them and currently dominating views on history, this catastrophe was a truly Ukrainian tragedy, while Jewish Holocaust was “others’ disaster”.
There are arguments supporting this view. Ukraine still lacks a serious Jewish museum and no significant memorial of Holocaust. The debates concerning collaboration between some portions of own population and German killers - like current intensive and painful discussions in neighboring Poland – take place in Ukraine almost without public participation. The private initiatives, at least recently, have been partly compensating the indifferent attitude demonstrated on the part of the state and its institutions. One of the most important initiatives is research by Patrick Du Bois who has been tirelessly travelling around Ukraine in recent years and interviewed over 2,000 eyewitnesses of destructive actions and burial places. During his expeditions, he managed to localize several hundreds of still unknown mass graves.
Thanks to the support of Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk and under the auspices of many research institutions as well as the Embassies of Germany, France, Israel and the US, the findings of this research are now presented in Kyiv at a small but extremely expressive exhibition.
The exhibition under the title “The Holocaust with bullets – mass shooting of Jews in Ukraine in 1941-1944” is not a kind of special discovery for experts. The photos of male Jews digging their graves themselves, the photos of naked panicking women rabbiting together and waiting for their killers to shoot, awful photos of the German soldier firing pointing-black into a woman with the newborn baby in her hands are not novel for historians.
A special value of this exhibition is that it looks at Holocaust from some Ukrainian perspective: core of the presentation is video records of Ukrainian eyewitnesses’ interviews, which father Du Bois took. Here Ukrainian public see that the elderly women try to get the load off their minds before the news reporter holding their tears back while saying what they saw then. An exhibition visitor may see Ukrainian schoolchildren and their parents closing their mouths with their hands not to cry while listening to the elderly witnesses’ stories. This way the memory about the phenomenon started in Babiy Yar little by little penetrates Ukrainian society.
