A.Anotoli (Kuznetsov) (2023 [1969]) Babi Yar: The Story of Ukraine’s Holocaust, translated from the Russian by David Floyd.

Vintage Classics has republished Babi Yar. A.Anotoli (Kuznetsov) describes Babi Yar as ‘a document in the form of a novel’.

What the author means by that is in the first line of the first chapter, Ashes (after the Preface): ‘This book contains nothing but the truth.’

Kuznetzov was born in 1929 in Kyiv. His mother was Ukrainian. His father a Soviet who was relocated when the Germans invaded, 21^st September 1941. As a twelve-year old, he lived in Kyiv was his mother, grandfather and grandmother when the Nazis came. His mother was a schoolteacher and lessons had been in Russian. Now school lessons were in German. She left to work in a factory. He kept a diary in Russian when he was fourteen. In the Preface this is explained more fully. His text was in Russian (translated into English). The capital spelt Kiev. Not Kyiv in the Ukrainian format.

He also noted as a writer in the Soviet Union he wasn’t allowed to write the truth. ‘Anti-Soviet stuff’ had to be removed before it could be considered for publication.

‘Social realism requires an author not to describe, not so much what really happened, as to what ought to have happened, or at any rate what might have happened.’

Stalin, for example, confiding to Churchill that he had to deport and starve to death around ten million Ukrainians. This wouldn’t appear in Soviet literature, even after Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Georgian’s excesses. Official sources, Kuzntesov suggests, put the figure nearer seven million.

‘A Chapter of Reminiscences’, chapter 1: Cannibals would not be published in the Soviet Union. More likely, the author of such a chapter would be murdered or sent to Siberia, which was much the same thing.

The worst famine in the Ukraine’s long history occurred under Soviet ruin in 1933. It is the first thing I can remember clearly in my life.

My father drawn and tired was sitting on a stool, telling his story.

He had just returned from Uman, where he had helped put through the collectivization of the farms.

“So we forced the peasants to join the collective farms at the point of a gun…But they refused to work. They simply hung around doing nothing with their hands in their pockets…

So we told ‘em: “Either the collectives or death.” They replied, “We’d sooner die.”

“But what they eat—that is beyond belief. There are no longer any frogs or mice about and not a single cat is left. They cut the ordinary grass and stubble for food. They peel the bark off pine trees, grind it down to a powder and cook pancakes from it. And there’s cannibalism everywhere.’  

Babi Yar was a ravine close to where Kuznetsov as a boy lived.

‘The river bed was of good course sand, but now for some reason or other the sand was mixed up with little white stones.

‘I bent down and picked one of them to look more closely. It was a small piece of bone, about as big as a fingernail, and it as charred on one side and white on the other. The stream was washing these pieces of bone out of somewhere and carrying them down with it. From this we concluded that the place where the Jews, Russians and Ukrainians and people of other nationalities had been shot was somewhere higher up.’

Left for dead, Dina Mironovna Promicheva was one of less than a handful who escaped the mass murder of around 68 000. Local Jews were shot in swathes by machine-gun fire. With history and hindsight, we know how mass murder works. Holocaust deniers start with the assumption it didn’t happen, and even if it did they dispute the numbers involved. Suggesting it was perhaps a few rogue guards. ‘Babi Yar no longer exists,’ even became Soviet doctrine. An attempt to fill in the ravine caused even more unpublicised deaths.

Sabra, the prickly symbolism of the new generation of Israelis, like to think they would have fought back then too.

Pronicheva’s eyewitness account makes nonsense of such generalisations. German propaganda was effective. Almost all Jews complied with the order to assemble. Even though the poorest of the poor were the Jews working on collective farms, Anatoli’s grandfather repeated what most were saying. ‘That’ll put paid to them getting rich at our expense’.

 Artrem street was very long and the procession moved very slowly. People hired transport for their possessions. The sick and children were carried on people’s backs. When they reached the Jewish cemetery bordering Babi Yar and the gateway to their death, there was no turning back. Barbed-wire barriers had been set up to corral those about to be murdered.

Germans with Ukrainian police moved along a few people at a time. They dealt brutally with dissenters who disobeyed the order to get undressed and leave their belongings. Terror worked in keeping control and also to keep the crowd moving into corridors. Pronochieva tells how most people refused to believe they were being slaughtered, even when they could hear the machine guns. Disassociation and rationalisations of what was happening occurred. She felt an ‘animal terror’.

When she understood they were being executed those around her were naked and struck dumb. They passed through a long corridor formed by soldiers, who hit out with clubs to the ribs, stomach and groin. Screamed at them to keep moving. Those who fell, the dogs held by soldiers pounced on. When they came to the end of one corridor, they were beaten again. A steep wall of sand blocked off where people were being machine gunned. Their bodies falling into the ravine and being buried in the sand quarry.

The Red Army had run away and surrendered in their millions. The Germans set up prison camps and let them starve to death. Following the retreat of 1941, the building in the Palace of Labour used by the secret police of the Ukrainian Republic was used by the Nazis for the same purpose.

‘Sometimes people on the streets outside could hear screams coming from the basement. It was generally believed that as far as ordinary mortals were concerned, they could only enter the building. It was very rarely that they came out again.’

A trip to Babi Yar was the most likely outcome. Anatolis’s grandfather and grandmother had been serfs. Soviet rule did not bring freedom. He was nostalgic for old times. When, for example, ‘A beggar hung out his socks to dry; Another beggar pinched them’.   

Although their daughter was a schoolteacher, book burning meant little to them. His grandfather, like many others, welcomed German rule with a bout of looting. Education was not for the masses. Adolf Hitler’s speech, 27^th April, 1923, set the tone, which sounds familiar.

‘What we have to do next is to change our whole system of education. We are suffering from far too much education. Importance is attached only to knowledge, but excessively clever people are the enemies of action, what we need is instinct and willpower.’  

Hunger was the teacher. German propaganda promised a great new life for those who volunteered to work in the Third Reich. Blocking off streets and picking up men and women to work in factories and farms proved more effective. Anotoli’s schooling finished aged 12. He was sent to work until he 14 and could be deported West for labour.

‘The old maths teacher at our school, Balystuk, died of hunger. Towards the end he tried to work as a labourer. The factories were reopened and workers were given a wage of 200 roubles a month.

A loaf of bread in the market then cost 120 roubles, a tumbler-full of underground wheat 20 roubles, a dozen potatoes 35 roubles, and a pound of lard 700 roubles.’

Work did not set you free. ‘Man lives to eat.’ Anotolis’s conclusion was based on his experience of starvation. He suggest of the majority of people on earth labour for little gain. ‘And it’s not because they prefer it that way, but because there is no other way for them.’ Life is brutal and short. A good meal makes heaven on earth.  

Babi Yar is a memorial to the truth. The author reminds us not to forget those cries. But he also offers a belief ‘no major crime against society can remain undetected’. He finished his book in 1969. He started writing it as a boy in his mother’s cramped house. He asks, ‘is there more barbarism ahead?’ The answer, of course, is being played out now, not only in Ukraine.  Russia, China, India and all nations including those in the West that have scapegoated minorities and refugees and embraced nationalism. Read on.