Silence at Babi Yar

No monument stands over Babi Yar; A drop sheer as a crude gravestone. --Yevgeni Yevtushenko, Babi Yar.

For three decades poets, writers, musicians and at least one politician in the Soviet Union have called for a monument to be built at Babi Yar, a desolate ravine near Kiev that is a worldwide symbol of Jewish martyrdom. There, on Sept. 29-30, 1941, a 150-man SS extermination team assembled the Jews of the German-occupied capital of the Ukraine, stripped them naked, lined them up on the edge of the ravine and machine-gunned them. Children were thrown into the ravine alive. The team halted only long enough to shovel sand over each layer of bodies. When the job was done 36 hours later, 33,771 Jews had perished--a record of efficiency unsurpassed even at Auschwitz. By the time the Germans were driven from Kiev in 1943, 100,000 to 200,000 Jews and non-Jews had been murdered at Babi Yar.

Silent Screams. Yet all efforts to memorialize the victims foundered on the Kremlin's unwillingness to acknowledge that Jews were particular targets of the Nazis. The postwar party chief in the Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, publicly promised to erect a monument at Babi Yar, but his plan was forestalled by Stalin's anti-Semitic drives. Even after Khrushchev himself took power in Moscow, Babi Yar remained a refuse-strewn wasteland. Poet Yevtushenko was fiercely rebuked for singling out Jews as victims of the massacre. So was Composer Dimitri Shostakovich, who made Babi Yar a theme of his 13th Symphony. Soviet Jews seeking to commemorate the massacre's anniversary have been jailed by local police.

Still, last summer construction of a monument near the ravine began. Yet now that the work has been completed, it is clear that there has still been no policy reversal in the Kremlin. Standing 50 ft. high, the memorial consists of eleven bronze statues representing such figures as a Communist guerrilla fighter, a Red Army soldier with clenched fist, and a sailor shielding an old woman. A plaque reads: "Here in 1941-1943 the German Fascist invaders executed over 100,000 citizens of Kiev and prisoners of war." The Jews are nowhere mentioned or portrayed, thus underscoring rather than answering Yevtushenko's plaint: "Everything here screams in silence."

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