Censored and then forgotten, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s "Babi Yar," about the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, is again painfully relevant.
Born in 1929, Kuznetsov lived on the outskirts of Kyiv with his Ukrainian schoolteacher mother and his grandparents (his Russian father, a policeman, abandoned the family) in a simple house with a garden. Close by, amid woods and cemeteries, was a long, steep ravine, called Babyn Yar by Ukrainian locals, where Kuznetsov and his friends played in the stream that trickled along the bottom. He was 12 when the Germans arrived, in September 1941. On September 28, they ordered Kyiv’s Jews to report to the rail station near Babyn Yar the next day—the rumor was that the Jews would be deported to Palestine. At home, the boy and his grandfather heard the steady rattle of machine-gun fire from the ravine. For two days the shooting never let up, and it continued sporadically for the next two years as the ravine became the grave of more than 100,000 people—first Jews, then Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists, and anyone unlucky enough to be taken there—until the Red Army drove the Nazis out of Kyiv in November 1943.
Around the time of the city’s liberation, Kuznetsov, now 14, began writing down everything he’d seen and heard during the occupation and war. “I had no idea why I was doing it,” he later wrote; “it seemed to me to be something I had to do, so that nothing should be forgotten.” When his mother found the notebook, she wept and urged him to one day turn it into a book.
Read Full Article »
