Writer Daniel Mendelsohn, a Jewish New Yorker of striking literary brilliance, has written about the deep reluctance he felt during his visit to Auschwitz in his memoir The Lost: ‘The gigantic, one-word symbol, the gross generalisation, the shorthand, for what happened to Europe’s Jews – although what happened at Auschwitz did not, in fact, happen to millions of Jews from places like Bolechow, Jews who were lined up and shot at the edges of open pits.’ Bolechow is the place, once in Poland, now in Ukraine, where the Mendelsohn family (or its survivors) come from. But the same could be written about the Jews of Kiev or the Jews of Berdichev, where Vasily Grossman’s mother was killed. Could Babi Yar, I wondered, be a similar kind of ‘gross generalisation’ for those East European Jews killed instantly by bullets (or buried alive in pits) instead of being murdered gradually in concentration camps? Could Babi Yar’s ‘vastness, the scope, the size’ become ‘an impediment to, rather than vehicle for, illumination’? More than anything else Daniel Mendelsohn wanted to rescue his relatives ‘from generalities, symbols, abbreviations’, and this is precisely what I wanted for Billie too, for whom the fate of European Jewry, while deeply affecting, could not have been more than a vast and heartbreaking generality.
We walked along the ravine for a while. I tried not to look at Billie’s face. Ira, a small figure in the distance, waited patiently for us. It occurred to me then that despite its scale and iconic place in the history of Soviet Jewry, Babi Yar was in some important ways profoundly different from Auschwitz. Its entire history after the war worked to counter any possibility of the site becoming a hollowed-out symbol, a museum of the dead. This thought, which came to me as an unformed hunch, was confirmed loud and clear in Australia almost a year after our visit, when the BBC reported that ‘Jewish groups have condemned a decision by the city of Kiev to allow a hotel to be built at the site of a Nazi massacre during World War II… Local authorities have approved plans to build dozens of hotels for the 2012 European Football Championship. One will be near a monument to victims of the Babi Yar massacre.’ I imagined the outcry there would have been if such a proposal was made in respect to Auschwitz. For a moment I could not understand how this plan for Babi Yar could have been entertained in the first place, let alone approved by the local authorities. Then I remembered.
Like Anatoly Kuznetsov, the writer Victor Nekrasov was not Jewish, and lost no member of his family at Babi Yar. Just like Kuznetsov, Nekrasov considered the murder of Kiev’s Jewish community to be a central reference point in his life – it was Jewish tragedy, his personal tragedy, Kiev’s tragedy, Ukrainian tragedy and universal tragedy all at once. Nekrasov was devastated by the neglect of the site after the war, writing about its fate with bitter irony in his Notes of a Gawker published when he was in exile in Paris. In the first years after the war, he wrote with unmistakable irony, the country ‘faced tasks more important than Babi Yar’, and it was ignored for the most part, except by ‘some suspicious characters who crawled along the ravine’s bottom in search of either diamonds or golden dental crowns’. Then it became ‘simply a rubbish heap. A small lopsided post with the laconic inscription “It is forbidden to pile rubbish here, fine – three hundred roubles” did not in the least prevent local residents from getting rid of no longer useful old beds, tin cans, and other rubbish.’
In 1959 Nekrasov was the first to raise publicly the question of Babi Yar’s neglect. He was writing in response to plans by the local authorities to build a stadium on the site. Who could have possibly thought of playing soccer on the site of such tragedy? he asked. Nekrasov was not allowed to mention the word ‘Jew’ in the article, which had to be replaced with innocuous ‘Kiev residents’, but he still managed to fool censorship and the editorial board, and to do it in style – the article was published on the day of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. It is almost impossible to believe that fifty years exactly separate the ‘sports proposals’ of 1959 and 2009.
At the time of Nekrasov’s article, Babi Yar was being filled, in a massive logistical operation. The area was blocked by a dam and masses of pulp – a mixture of water and mud – from a nearby brick factory were pumped into the ravine through special pipes. The idea was that the sand contained in the mud would settle and accumulate and the water would drain through gutters and flow out through the dam. Then the good-for-nothing ravine could once and for all be wiped from the surface of the earth. Both Nekrasov and Kuznetsov watched the filling of Babi Yar in shock. ‘I used to go there,’ wrote Kuznetsov, ‘and look in astonishment at the lake of mud devouring ash, human bones, rocky screes of gravestones. The water in it was rotten, green, still, and night and day you heard the sounds of pipes pumping the pulp. This lasted for several years. The dam was added to, it grew, and by 1961 it became the height of a six-storey building.’
On 13 March 1961 the dam collapsed. ‘At 8.45 in the morning a terrifying roar was heard, a great billow of liquid mud around ten metres high rolled out from the mouth of Babi Yar. Surviving witnesses, observing from a distance, insist that this wave flew out of the ravine like an express train, so no one could escape it.’ There were thousands of victims – most of them in the adjacent and lower-located Kurenyovka neighbourhood. (In official reports the number was slightly over a hundred.) Those who lived at ground level were killed instantly – the rescuers would later find their bodies thrown up to the ceilings. The rest could only hope to survive by escaping to the roofs of their buildings and waiting to be airlifted to safety. This is what happened to my mum’s four-year-old second cousin, Vadik (the son of her cousin Arkady). My auntie Lina’s friend from university was not so lucky; she perished in the slide (together with my auntie’s invaluable maths notes).
The catastrophic mudslide, however, did not convince authorities to change their attitude to the site, although among the people of Kiev the idea of the curse or the revenge of Babi Yar became understandably widespread. Of course what happened at Babi Yar was, in the words of the Holocaust historian Ilya Altman, part of the official policy to ‘systemically thwart any efforts to preserve sites of Holocaust memory’. In a number of places across the Soviet Union, Altman notes, six-pointed stars of David were turned into Soviet five-pointed stars. In Babi Yar, Nekrasov tells us, people used to come to a site overgrown with weeds and shrubs, weep and spread flowers. There was little point in bringing wreaths, as there was nowhere to put them, nothing to lean them against. ‘But no, one day in 1966, a crowd of many thousands of people gathered here [Twenty-five years so to speak, an anniversary!] and several people, including one member of the Communist Party addressed the crowd with speeches that were not checked by anyone and were not approved anywhere. I was that member of the Communist Party.’