Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel “Babi Yar” relives the Nazis’ execution of tens of thousands of Jews in 1941. On Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, in a ravine just outside Kyiv called Babyn Yar (“Babi Yar” in Russian), Nazis executed nearly 34,000 Jews over the course of 36 hours. It was the deadliest mass execution in what came to be known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.” We were never supposed to know it happened. In 1943, as the Nazis fled Kyiv, they ordered the bodies in Babyn Yar to be dug up and burned, to erase all memory of what they’d done. The Nazis planned to kill the workers they tasked with destroying the bodies. “But they didn’t succeed,” one declared proudly. The Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa included newsreel footage in his documentary “Babi Yar. Context” (2021) of one of the men giving an interview. He and 12 others (out of 300) escaped “and can now testify,” he tells the camera, “to the whole world and our motherland to the acts of barbarity committed by those fascist dogs in our beloved Kyiv.” And yet, not everyone believed the story. In October 1943, the Soviets invited a delegation of American journalists to Babyn Yar, gave them a tour of the ravine and told them of the atrocities that had occurred there. Their reports were bafflingly contradictory. Though hair and bones were mixed in with the dirt under their feet, some of the journalists considered these fragments just that: pieces of some bigger, unclear whole. Others dissented. In a frustrated letter to his parents, Bill Downs (Newsweek, CBS) concluded: “It seems that the Presbyterian mind of the average American cannot accept the fact that any group of people can coolly sit down and decide to torture thousands of people. … This refusal to believe these facts,” he noted, “is probably the greatest weapon the Nazis have.” On that September day in 1941, a 12-year-old boy named Anatoly Kuznetsov was in his Kyiv courtyard with his grandfather. They lived a stone’s throw from the ravine and could hear a sound: “ta-ta-ta, ta-ta.” “They’re shooting ’em,” his grandfather realized. All morning the city had been abuzz with rumor: “Where are they taking them? What are they doing with them?” The city’s Jewish population had been told to report at 8 o’clock, to bring valuables and warm clothing. Many assumed — hoped — this meant deportation. However, others could feel the truth even if they had not seen it yet. Earlier that morning, Kuznetsov recalled, a young girl threw herself from a window. After the war, a witness said he had seen a woman that morning standing in front of her home crying out in Yiddish. He told the war crimes tribunal: “Her entire body expressed such a terror, such extreme despair, that it is hard to imagine such a degree of human suffering. One cannot explain it with words. It cannot be told.”
via ny times: ‘One Cannot Explain It With Words’: The Holocaust by Bullets
By <a href=”//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Olga_Loboda_0806″ title=”User:Olga Loboda 0806″>Olga Loboda 0806</a> – <span class=”int-own-work” lang=”en”>Own work</span>, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link