No Monument Stands over Babi Jar

The ravine at Babi Jar is on the outskirts of Kiev in the Ukraine. Before the Wehrmacht was driven from the Soviet Union in 1944, it’s estimated that 100,000 to 150,000 Ukrainian Jews, Russians and Roma were murdered there. There are historians who say that if the Allies had reacted to that first systematic massacre where 34,000 Jews were brutally killed on the 29th and 30th of September 1941, that perhaps the Holocaust could have been prevented.

The first time I heard the name Babi Jar was when the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme referred to it in an angry speech condemning the U.S. Air Force’s bombing of Hanoi during the Christmas holidays of 1972.  Palme compared the bombings to other places where violence and terror had triumphed but “where history had judged its perpetrators harshly.” With measured, precise diction he said, “This is an infamous and evil deed and a new name is added to a long list of infamies: Guernica, Oradour, Babi Jar, Katyn, Lidice, Treblinka and Sharpeville are joined today by the name Hanoi”. Palme’s speech and the Swedish government´s sharp criticism of the Vietnam War, infuriated the American President Nixon and his Secretary of Defense Henry Kissinger to the point where the U.S. severed diplomatic ties with Sweden. In the aftermath, like the unprincipled demagogues that they were, Nixon and Kissinger referred to the brilliant Palme as "that Swedish asshole” but Palme’s speech and the Swedish government’s protests are regarded as having been catalytic in shaping opinion and unifying Europe against the war. There have been many barbarities committed before and since, but until my friend Joel brought up the atrocities that took place at Babi Jar, it was just a name that I vaguely remembered from that speech.

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Joel was a friend and neighbor, one of our  gang of food-friends that met often and took turns cooking for one another. We usually celebrated holidays and birthdays together, or met just because it was the weekend and someone was inspired by a new recipe and felt like cooking. We were a surprisingly tight group, considering our different backgrounds, half a dozen couples bonded together socially, not only by our culinary interests and the fact that we were about the same age and lived in a small village, but by the indefinable chemistry of friendship.

It was mid-summer eve, the longest day of the year, when the sun at our latitude dips below the horizon for an hour or so and then pops up in about the same place. If the skies are clear it doesn’t get dark at all; there is just a brief twilight with enough light to read outdoors if you are inclined. We sat on the veranda overlooking the bay and inner islands and even if it wasn’t that late by most party standards, the sun was already rising out of the thin veil of mist that lay draped over the sea.

We sat picking at the scraps that were left from the evening’s meal, chatting as we always did, scattering our memories and experiences around like the plates and cutlery that littered the table. We had discussed everything from love affairs to lawnmowers and even if we never talked about politics right initially, we seemed somehow to always end up there. The newspapers were full of articles about the right-wing parties that were springing up in Scandinavia and the rest of Europe and had won substantial support in the latest national elections. We wondered who had pushed the replay button because events of the past seemed to be repeating themselves. Why anyone would naively embrace the catastrophic politics that had destroyed Europe a generation earlier was a mystery.

Experience taught us that throughout history those who advocated nationalism in all forms always managed to drown out or silence the voices of reason and sanity that condemned it. The political platforms of these parties had echoes of neo fascism, an eerily familiar message that was both xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic. Politicians on the far right who called themselves patriots, were really just white supremacists in suits and ties who were pedaling a disguised doctrine of ethnocentrism. Ghosts of the past that were no longer silent and invisible were beginning to haunt the political scene. The calculus was easy. These extremist ideologies were popular because they offered uninformed people simple solutions to complex problems..

He maintained that nothing had really changed since the Second World War and that the collective memory of nations was short and selective. These crimes against humanity affect every one of us. The violence and ethnic cleansing that had taken place in Africa and the Balkans in the last decades should be a warning. He illustrated his point by telling us about an acquaintance of his, Mira, who was an innocent casualty of the civil war in Bosnia. Mira, a name that ironically was a derivative of the word peace, had come home to live with his parents in Sarajevo because the intense fighting had no clear boundaries and had closed his university. He was wounded by one of the Serbian snipers that terrorized the city while he was searching for food on the chance that despite the long siege, there might be a market that had something to sell. When the shooter was tracked down and identified, he turned out to be Mira's former high school chemistry teacher. Mira wondered if his former teacher turned sniper recognized him through his telescopic sight and chose to spare him, or did he simply miss his target by a foot, hitting his arm rather than his heart. The teacher turned sniper was tortured and then summarily executed by the  militiamen that found him in the bombed out building where he was hiding. Joel’s point: ethnic cleansing always filtered down to the level of neighbor against neighbor.

 Joel was an internationalist that spoke five languages and whose good natured wit always livened up our conversations. When the need arose, he settled our arguments with his broad knowledge of things practical and intellectual. He was lean with sharp cheek bones and a pronounced chin. His curly, reddish blond hair had begun to thin early and together with his steel-rimmed spectacles gave him the appearance of a mild and affable bookworm. He seemed distracted, his melancholy growing in proportion to his wine consumption and the turn that the conversation had taken. 

Joel’s parents were refugees, Ukrainian Jews from Kiev that had experienced the escalating violence and anti-Semitism in the Ukraine and on the Continent. 

Urged by their families who had memories of earlier pogroms, they fled to Poland in 1939  with the hopes of crossing the Baltic and finding asylum in Denmark. They sold what they had and travelled the 500 miles to the Polish coast on lorries, in karts or on foot, as goyim, non-Jews, with forged travel documents. When they finally arrived in Gdansk they hid in the basement of the safe house that Catholic priests kept to aid members of the resistance until the trip to Denmark could be arranged. Smuggling refugees from German occupied Poland was a lucrative but dangerous business, and until a boat owner was found who was willing to take the chance, they lived in fear of being betrayed and shot. There were smugglers who brokered passages, always for a fee that corresponded to the risks they took. Humanitarian, gestures were commodities that were for sale.

With assistance from the Polish underground, they found a fisherman that would make the perilous 200 mile journey across the Baltic through drifting ice and patrol boats. They paid with the only currency they had, jewelry, family heirlooms, mostly gold including their wedding rings. The smuggler hid them along with other refugees in the bilge filled hold of his trawler among the nets and buoys. They were sea-sick and freezing and the creaking and moaning of the thick fir boarding every time the hull smashed into the  roiling twenty foot waves frightened them as much as being captured by the Gestapo. After choosing a safe route to avoid the coastal minefields, they were put ashore near Copenhagen and taken care of by the Red Cross. In 1943 they fled again, when Göring the architect of the "final solution," demanded that Denmark's occupation authorities deport the Jewish population to concentration camps. This time with the help of the Danish resistance they made the short trip across Öresund to Malmö in neutral Sweden, once again refugees whose homeland was nothing more than the place where they were born.

Joel's parents had escaped the Holocaust but the fate of his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins that perished, cast a long shadow over his life. His parents were guilt ridden survivors that repaid the debt that they felt they owed fate by keeping the memories of their dead family alive. The horrors of the Holocaust  and their unhealed war-time trauma taught Joel how thin and easily cracked the veneer we call civilization is. He lamented the fact that the anti-Semitism that had surfaced in Southern Sweden was a reminder that people had forgotten about the murderous policies that had destroyed Europe and quoted the words of George Santayana "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.". He continued, “The aspirations of fascism didn't die with the Nazis. For many Europeans ethnic hate still begins with the Jews and ends with the Jews".

That night he told us the rest of his family history, describing the terrors of the Kiev Massacre where his relatives were killed, the bodies thrown into the ravine at Babi Jar and covered with quick lime and earth. Thirty-four thousand Jews, mostly children and elderly men and women were murdered in those hellish autumn days of 1941. We listened. He pushed away his chair, hesitated a moment and tapped on his glass with a fork. He stood leaning against the table and then straightened his shoulders. Clearing his throat he began reciting from memory Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s sorrowful poem “No Monument Over Babi Jar.” Joel’s choked, guttural Russian, the language of his parents and the language of his dead relatives, silenced the room.

No monument stands over Babi Jar
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone
I am afraid. Today I am as old in years as all the Jewish people...

And after a dozen verses he concluded:
The wild grasses rustle over Babi Jar
The trees look ominous, like judges
Here all things scream silently
And baring my head
Slowly I feel myself turning gray
And I myself am one massive soundless scream
Above the thousand, thousand buried here
I am each old man here shot dead
I am every child here shot dead
Nothing in me will ever forget

We didn’t understand the words as he spoke them, but we shared his emotion and the tears that seeped through the stubble on his unshaven cheeks. When he was finished he translated some of the verses into Swedish and then explained that he felt the real tragedy of Babi Jar was that almost no one had heard of, or remembered the massacre of the people who were clubbed to death by neighbors, or forced to kneel on the muddy ground and then shot in the head by local police or the S.S. and then bulldozed into the ravine. He said he was crying because the Soviet government never raised a monument to honor the dead and said once again, “the world seems to have learned nothing since then”. I could only agree; democracy and empathy were on the retreat in the world. We only had room for our own problems and were complacent and compliant as long as we had our place in the sun. I felt ashamed because I realized that I was like everybody else: content to stand by and accept government by the strong and immoral.

Morning had broken when we woke the children, wrapped them in blankets and carried them home along the pine fragrant forest path that led to our back door. We heard a cuckoo call in the distance. In Swedish folklore it is said that you could tell the future by listening to them. A call from the south was a foreboding of death, from the west good fortune, from the east solace or comfort, and from the north sorrow.