Babi Yar
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of massacres carried out by German forces and local Ukrainian collaborators during their campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first, and best documented, of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, killing approximately 33,771 Jews. The decision to kill all the Jews in Kiev was made by the military governor, Major-General Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. Sonderkommando 4a soldiers, along with the aid of the SD and SS Police Battalions backed by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police carried out the orders.
In literature
In his 1961 book Star in Eclipse: Russian Jewry Revisited, Joseph Schechtman provided an account of the Babi Yar tragedy. In 1966, Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel was published in censored form in the Soviet monthly literary magazine Yunost. Kuznetsov began writing a memoir of his wartime life when he was 14. Over the years he continued working on it, adding documents and eyewitness testimony. He managed to smuggle 35 mm photographic film containing the uncensored manuscript when he defected, and the book was published in the West in 1970.
In 1985, a documentary film Babiy Yar: Lessons of History by Vitaly Korotich was made to mark the tragedy.
In 2021, it was released the documentary Babi Yar. Context by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa. The film explores the prelude and aftermath of the massacre using footage shot by German and Soviet troops.
The massacre of Jews at Babi Yar has inspired artists. A poem was written by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko; this in turn was set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13. An oratorio was composed by the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych to the text of Dmytro Pavlychko (2006). A number of films and television productions have also marked the tragic events at Babi Yar, and D. M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel uses the massacre's anonymity and violence as a counterpoint to the intimate and complex nature of the human psyche.
See also
- Babi Yar in poetry
- Symphony No. 13, called Babi Yar, by Shostakovich
- Symphony No.1 In Memoriam to the Martyrs of Babi Yar by Dmitri Klebanov (1945, audio)
- Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center
- Consequences of Nazism
- Genocides in history
- History of the Jews in Ukraine
- List of massacres in Ukraine
- Mass graves in the Soviet Union
- Operation Barbarossa
- Reichskommissariat Ukraine
- Ukrainian collaborationism with the Axis powers
- Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs
- The Kindly Ones