BABI YAR: A Document in the Form of a Novel

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FRANCE 24 looks back at this unspeakable event 80 years on, as plans are finally underway for an official museum honouring the victims’ memory. The group of academics guiding the project is led by Father Patrick Desbois, a French priest and co-founder of Yahad-In Unum, an organisation dedicated to finding mass graves of Jewish Holocaust victims. Paul Blobel, who had been in control of the mass murders in Babi Yar two years earlier, supervised the Sonderaktion 1005 in eliminating its traces. The German occupiers demanded that Kyiv’s Jews gather near a train station on the city’s outskirts for “resettlement” elsewhere; those who refused to go there were threatened with death.

The book is fiercely candid about Soviet crimes and Red Army failures during the “Great Patriotic War”; it’s also clear-eyed about the extent of Ukrainian collaboration, even as it vividly evokes Ukrainian suffering. The book was first published in censored form in 1966 as seen through the eyes of Anatoli who was half-Russian, half-Ukrainian. Ukrainian Jews lay flowers during a memorial ceremony at the Babi Yar menorah monument in September 2007. Since then, the site has become as contentious as the war itself, with different stakeholders coming forward to erect their own memorials to other ethnic, religious, political and demographic groups murdered at Babi Yar—Romani people, children, priests and Ukrainian nationalists.However, even more incredible was the actions taken by the Nazis between August 19 and September 28 last. He arrived in London on a two-week visa, accompanied by Georgy Andjaparidze, a suspected KGB "mamka", a secret police agent. Anatoli describes his family: “That’s the sort of people we were before the arrival of the Nazis and of the war in general: quite unimportant, not liable for military service, elderly people, a woman and a little boy – the sort of people, in short, who want the war least of all and who nevertheless seem to suffer most from it.

It tells the story of the Nazi occupation of Kiev from the point of view of the author, who does his best to recapture his 12-year-old innocence (hiding with his cat in the bomb shelter, the joy he takes in joining in the looting, or collecting spent artillery shells with his friends) and how that innocence is lost over the following 778 days.Germans continued to perpetrate mass murders at this killing site until just before the Soviets re-took control of Kyiv in 1943. Otto Rasch was also indicted in the Einsatzgruppen Trial but his case was discontinued for health reasons, and he died in prison in 1948. This would be a good companion to John Hersey's Hiroshima both as historical documents of how WWII affected civilians and reminders of the atrocities that humans inflict upon one another. Particolarmente documentato e noto fu quello compiuto il 29 e 30 settembre 1941, in cui trovarono la morte 33.

He does this through the lives of his mother, grandmother, grandfather (‘Gramps’) and his cat, Titus, throughout the occupation.The crimes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in the 1930s and ’40s defied all precedents of analysis and feeling. Fyodor Vlasovich Semerik (grandfather): Born in the Russian Empire, he lived through the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union. Excerpt from “Testimony of Dina Pronicheva about the Annihilation of the Jews in Babi Yar on September 29-30, 1941” available from Yad Vashem Written Testimonies.