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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
What is a place? A place where things happened, horrible things, the traces of which have been erased? Ukraine, for a long time, has been filled with these 'inconvenient places' which embarrass everyone, no matter which side of post-Soviet memorial politics they stand on: crimes of Stalinism, crimes of Nazism, crimes of nationalists, crimes of Russians; the killings follow one after another on this battered territory which aspires only to a form of peace and normality. With the photographer Antoine d'Agata, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Littell began to survey Babyn Yar, the site of the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, and the traces left on the landscape. The war came to interrupt their work. It resumed quite quickly in another form, in another place, the small suburban town of Bucha, which became infamous after the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated there by the Russian occupying forces. Again, a place where things happened; again, a place whose traces we erase as quickly as possible. How then to write, how to photograph, when there is literally nothing to see – or almost nothing?
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‘Of the three ways of observing – as witness, whose meticulous, dispassionate descriptions become the fabric of the past; as voyeur, devouring the sight of the present with limitless appetite; as seer, finding in the now intimations of things to come – Jonathan Littell chooses all three at once. He doesn’t flinch from the bare, intimate detail of Russia’s visitation of death and destruction on Ukraine. Although sometimes the reader might prefer it if he did, it’s not because Littell’s visions are naked of euphemism, but because it falls to the reader themself to clothe these events in meaning. With his companion d’Agata, Littell, so fascinated by monuments, has made one with this book.’ — James Meek, author of To Calais, In Ordinary Times
‘In An Inconvenient Place, Jonathan Littell takes us on a journey into the most disturbing of modern human landscapes, from the jumble of horrors that were the ravines of Babyn Yar, into the cellars of Bucha. In chiselled, uncompromising prose, accompanied by haunting photographs by Antoine d’Agata, Littell’s unforgettable account is nothing less than a moral triumph over the wilful amnesia imposed on history’s savageries by its perpetrators.’ — Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara
‘An impressionistic rather than analytical book, [An Inconvenient Place] is not intended as a definitive account of Ukraine’s recent history. That will be for historians to provide, and Jonathan Littell knows how quickly words can be reduced to irrelevance. He and Antoine d’Agata have produced an insightful and frequently terrifying document whose reflections on depravity and resilience are likely to prove durable, come what may.’ — Luke Warde, Times Literary Supplement4
5
AN INCONVENIENT PLACE
JONATHAN LITTELL & ANTOINE D’AGATA
Translated by
CHARLOTTE MANDELL
6
7
‘The place of the absence of place, the non-place, the nowhere.’ — Georges Perec, Ellis Island8
Contents
Note on spelling
In this book, I’ve favoured Ukrainian spellings of the names of people or places. Thus ‘Kyiv’ and not ‘Kiev’, ‘Babyn Yar’ and not ‘Babiy Yar’ or ‘Babi Yar’, ‘Volodymyr’ rather than ‘Vladimir,’ etc. It is true that many of my bilingual interlocutors, when speaking Russian, used the Russian form of their name to identify themselves; but most of them, if they spoke to me in Ukrainian, would also have quite naturally used the Ukrainian form of their name. Since the latter is the one that figures on their identity papers, it’s the one I’ve kept.
Two exceptions: when a Russian person or city is concerned I of course use the Russian spelling; I also preserve original spellings, often Russian, in quotations, whether by Ukrainian authors writing in Russian, Russian authors or foreign authors.
J.L.
10
ONCE AGAIN
1. In 1990, a woman who was close to me at the time asked Maurice Blanchot to contribute to a journal she was editing. His reply took the form of two letters: one, handwritten and personal, the other, typewritten and public. I translated the latter (under a pen name) for the journal. It began: ‘Dear Madam, please forgive me for answering you with a letter. Reading yours, in which you ask me to write a text for inclusion in an issue of an American academic journal (Yale) on the topic: ‘Literature and the Ethical Question’, I was frightened and nearly in despair. ‘Once again, once again,’ I said to myself. Not that I pretend to have exhausted an inexhaustible subject, but on the contrary with the certainty that such a subject returns to me because it is intractable.’1
2. An intractable subject that returns to me. One could just as well say a stone thrown at my head that stuns me, makes me stupid. Even before I began I was already exhausted. Blanchot again: ‘To want to write, how absurd: writing is the decay of the will.’2
3. It was early 2021, when Europe was emerging with difficulty from Covid. A friend proposed I write about Babyn Yar. ‘Why don’t you write something about Babyn Yar? You should write about Babyn Yar.’ Again? Oh no, not again.
4. This friend was very persuasive. ‘Listen, you’re working on Chernobyl,’ he said. ‘Babyn Yar is the same, it’s a Zone.’ The idea was not uninteresting. All the more so since the term ‘Exclusion Zone’, used in both French and English, is not an accurate translation: Zona 12vidchuzhennya, the Ukrainian term, as well as the Russian term Zona otchuzhdeniya, is closer to ‘Alienation Zone’. For a while, I vaguely thought about making it my title. But that was a dead end.
5. Antoine d’Agata happened to be in Kyiv. ‘What if we did it together?’ I asked him. When in dismay and confusion, it’s always better to have company.
6. We visited the place together. This was in April, it was grey, the trees were bare. There wasn’t really much to see. I drew up an inventory: two parks, a forest, one large ravine and two small ones, an underground river, monuments (lots of monuments), three churches (one very old, two new), a synagogue, also brand-new, a psychiatric asylum, a psychiatric prison, an unfinished psychiatric institute, two cemeteries (one Orthodox, the other military), the traces of two other erased cemeteries (one Jewish, the other Orthodox), the Ukrainian television offices, the Ukrainian television tower, apartment buildings, shops, schools and nurseries, an abandoned cinema, a metro, a maternity ward, a hospital, a morgue. Antoine was just as unconvinced as I was: ‘You want me to photograph what, exactly?’ Better to drop the whole thing, I said to myself. Forget this story, move on to something else.
7. John Steinbeck also went to Kyiv with a photographer, Robert Capa, in 1947. They didn’t go to see Babyn Yar. Steinbeck doesn’t mention it in his book. He must not even have known of its existence.3
8. Almost twenty years later, in 1965, at the request of an Israeli newspaper, Elie Wiesel visited the USSR. He knew very well what Babyn Yar was, but he couldn’t locate 13the site on any map of Kyiv. It was as if the place had disappeared.
The official guides at Intourist refuse to take you there. Even to talk about it. If you insist, they reply: “It’s not worth visiting; there’s nothing to see.” And they are right. No point bothering. You’ll discover nothing there. No monument, no commemorative plaque. In Babi-Yar, the main thing is evaded. What you see with the naked eye you can also see anywhere else. Anywhere in Kiev. In every square, every public place. It’s as if Babi-Yar extended to the entire city…. [T]he guides at Intourist are right: Babi-Yar is a place just like any other.4
9. Two things can be said about Babyn Yar: it’s not just an idea, but it’s also not entirely a place.
10. Perhaps you could also say it’s a monad? In his course on Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze defines the monad as a subject insofar as it expresses the totality of the world. ‘My soul expresses the entire world but it clearly expresses only a small part of the world, which is my département [my territory, Leibniz writes elsewhere]. My département is limited.’5 What Leibniz says about the subject is also true for the place: Babyn Yar (as well as other places that we will also visit) expresses, if not the whole world, then at least a certain dimension of the world much vaster than its few acres folded under a banal neighbourhood of Kyiv.
11. The problem is history. In Babyn Yar, history too is folded. On the surface, it acts like a gendarme with his cape and kepi, waving his white truncheon: ‘Move on, there’s nothing to see here.’ Which might encourage 14someone slightly resistant precisely to move on, to move on endlessly.
12. To survey, to list, to photograph, to describe. Day after day, season after season. Sometimes together, sometimes alone.
13. It wasn’t easy, but I finally wrote a first version of this book. While I was writing, the Russian Federation was massing its troops at the Ukrainian border and launching manoeuvres in Belarus, deploying hundreds of assault tanks two hours by road from Kyiv. According to my notes, I finished the manuscript on 22 February 2022. On the 24th, at 5.07 a.m. local time, Russia launched a series of strikes on Ukraine and began its invasion. I learned the news when I woke up, at around 9 a.m. Already, the text I had written became entirely irrelevant. But that was the least of my concerns. Today I’m starting over, from an entirely different perspective. Once again. It is 8 November 2022, the 258th day of the war, and nothing is the same, not the cities of Ukraine, not the lives of my friends, not the questions that matter. To speak about Babyn Yar no doubt still has meaning, but no longer the same one.
SITUATION
14. I’m speaking to you about Babyn Yar, Babiy Yar in Russian, as if you knew what it was. But perhaps you don’t. Here are the essential points. The Nazi armies invading the Soviet Union occupied the city of Kyiv on 19 September 1941. On the 26th, the high command, including officers of the Wehrmacht as well as of the SS, made 15the decision to liquidate the city’s Jewish population. The ‘final solution’ hadn’t yet been decided on, that would come a few months later, and this was an ad hoc decision, logical to the Nazi mind, whose purpose was to avenge the dynamiting by the Soviets, in the preceding days, of a number of buildings housing German soldiers and officers, especially along Khreshchatyk, the central avenue of the city. A place was chosen on the city’s outskirts, in a derelict zone scattered with factories, cemeteries, a few houses, and crisscrossed by deep ravines. The one chosen for the Grosse Aktion was locally known as Babyn Yar: the ‘ravine of the old lady’, in the most widely accepted sense, even though this etymology is contested (the word yar, commonly used in Ukraine for a ravine, is of Turkish origin). On 29 and 30 September, the German forces shot, according to their own obsessive reckoning, 33,771 Jews of all ages. The killings would continue, in this ravine, throughout the entire occupation, turning little by little into a regular procedure, on Tuesdays and Thursdays according to some sources. In total, the number of victims is estimated to be a hundred thousand – sixty thousand Jews and forty thousand other people, Red Army soldiers, sailors from the Dnipro fleet, political commissars, NKVD agents, civilians taken hostage, Roma, Ukrainian nationalists, priests, psychiatric patients, and many others who had the misfortune of displeasing the occupiers. These are the facts between 1941 and 1943.
15. As for the massacre itself, I’ve already described it elsewhere. I won’t repeat it here.
OUT OF THE DEPTHS
16. You can go to Babyn Yar by metro. You take Line 3 and get out at the Dorohozhychi station, northwest of the centre. When this station was dug out, in the 90s after independence, the workers, rumour has it, hauled truckloads of bones to the surface. The authorities had to call in an expert, Ilya Levitas, director of the Jewish Council of Ukraine, who finally determined that the site of the massacre was fifteen metres to the right of the worksite.6 Apparently I met this Ilya Levitas once, in 2002, when I was already carrying out research in Kyiv. His name and his contact details appear in my notes of that time, dated 20 August, along with some fragments of information he provided me, especially on the participation of Ukrainian collaborators in the massacre. Unfortunately, I don’t remember him, and he is dead now.
17. The scandal stifled thanks to Levitas’ intervention, the station was inaugurated in March 2000. Move on, move on. But the repressed always returns. The friend I mentioned above is named Ilya Khrzhanovskiy; he is a filmmaker, and for some years now has been the artistic director of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (BYHMC), a private memorial foundation which we will return to, founded after the Maidan Revolution by a group of Russian, Ukrainian, American, but above all Jewish oligarchs and businessmen. Ilya Khrzhanovskiy tried, for a while, to have the station renamed ‘Babyn Yar’. In vain. The neighbourhood revolted, the authorities panicked, he quickly had to back down. Everything has its limits.17
18. One day in June 2021, the year before the Russian invasion, Antoine and I took the metro on Line 3 to go 18to Babyn Yar. In Dorohozhychi, the doors slammed open and the dense crowd poured out of the carriages, surging in little streams separated by the marble arches before merging on the platform in a compact flood surging towards the escalators. They were people of all ages, distinguished by their clothing, their hair, their bags, their possessions, the shapes of their bodies. Channelled, they flowed towards where they thought they had to go, without wondering much about what was awaiting them there. Antoine photographed them with a thermal camera: the images showed a line of orange ghosts in human shape, advancing in a line against a blue background.
19. Dorohozhychi station, like all metro stations in the former USSR, was designed to serve as a shelter in case of war; and so it was in its depths that the neighbourhood took refuge on 22 February 2022 and on the days that followed. The great marble concourse was transformed into a camp; the people, wrapped in their parkas and surrounded by a few possessions, bags of food and bottles of mineral water, slept lined up on mattresses or on the benches of the carriages parked there, amongst the echoes of crying children, yapping dogs and the murmur of anxious voices.
20. I love taking the interminable escalators of the Kyiv metro. The one in Dorohozhychi station takes at least three minutes to haul you up to the exit. This gave me plenty of time to contemplate the illumined advertising boxes, one every eight seconds, the perspective of the vaulted ceiling’s arches slipping by, the weary shoulders of the person perched on the step above mine, the closed-off faces of people lost in their thoughts or their 19telephones on their way down the opposite escalator, a rare, fleeting smile.
21. At the top, you had to push one of the heavy glass doors. It was massive, it resisted, I wondered how children and old people managed it. It opened onto a perekhid, a covered but not entirely underground passageway that linked together several ramps or stairways leading to different sides of the intersection on the surface. In this perekhid there are: a Big-Burg, an Arabik Shaurma, a Kolo mini-mart, a nameless hair salon, two florists displaying their bouquets on the floor, a kiosk selling electronics, a bargain shop called Bonus, a Watsons pharmacy, and four kiosks selling coffee and cake: Kaviarnia-Konditerska, Premium Coffee, Energy Coffee and Aroma Kava. Antoine somewhat at random elected Aroma Kava, I ordered tea, he an espresso, and we gulped them down standing there in the midst of the locals and the homeless people huddled in the corners. Later we often went back there; sometimes we offered coffee for the homeless people, the ones they call bomzh here. In the winter it warmed you up, it did you good.
AT GROUND LEVEL
22. Behind Aroma Kava, the perekhid opened right out into a vast park. This is what we were looking at while we blew on our scalding drinks. Designed in the 1970s and completed in 1980, it is divided into three large sections: the first two are flat, with few trees, criss-crossed with perfectly straight lanes, and separated by Yurii Illienko Street and the perekhid of the metro. The third section is higher up, bordered by little ravines and merging with a 20large forest called the Kyrylivskyy Hai. During the day, it’s quietly bustling with people jogging and strolling, solitary retirees, teenagers in groups, local residents walking their dogs, young women pushing strollers, often in pairs or accompanied by their own mothers. These people are drinking beer, talking into their phones, laughing, chatting, and royally ignoring the dozens of monuments scattered every few feet throughout the park. If you venture a little into the woods to the side, you quickly come across the remnants of small campfires, piles of rubbish and empty bottles. At night, the main lanes are lit by LED streetlights; behind them, dark, stand the trees, the mass of forest. The park doesn’t empty out; you can hear footsteps on the flagstones, muffled, banal conversations, laughter, then crickets and, further away, the constant throb of vehicles on Illienko and especially on Olena Teliha Street, the main axis separating the park from the Syrets neighbourhood. At night, the woods are the domain of the bomzh, and few people venture into them, except solitary drinkers and lovers in need of intimate space, who scatter their condoms between the trees. But my favourite time there is winter. When the snow falls from the grey, overcast sky, light, magical, it gently carpets the park, and everything is still just as busy, the passersby, well-wrapped phantoms, continue strolling along the footpaths, the children in fluorescent snowsuits flee their annoyed parents or else play with their sledges with shrill cries of happiness, forming a series of colourful little blotches on the thick white layer blanketing the expanse.
23. I had been told: Babyn Yar is here. But Babyn Yar was a ravine, and here it’s completely flat. What a funny non-place, even the ravines have disappeared. It started 21immediately after the killings: already on the night of 29 September, the Germans dynamited or knocked down with mechanical diggers parts of the slopes of the yar to cover the bodies. Look at the famous colour photos taken, probably on 1 October 1941, by a certain Johannes Hähle, the official photographer of Propagandakompanie 637: in three of them, you’ll see dozens of Soviet prisoners of war, guarded by soldiers from the Wehrmacht, busy flattening with shovels the mass of earth poured onto the corpses. And the German camouflage attempt continued until the end. Starting in mid-August 1943, not long before the retaking of the city by the Red Army, the SS mobilized several hundred prisoners from the concentration camp in Syrets, Jews and others, to dig up the victims’ remains and burn them on huge bonfires built with train tracks as well as the wrought iron railings and the headstones of the nearby Jewish cemetery. On 29 September, the day of the second anniversary of the initial massacre, 327 of these prisoners, knowing they too would soon be liquidated, rose up; eighteen of them survived to testify about this clean-up operation. The Soviet authorities continued and completed their work. In 1950, a Kyiv municipal commission decided to entirely level Babyn Yar by pouring through it the muddy water run-off from the many brick factories in Syrets or on Kyrylivska Street (most of whose former owners and workers, Jews, lay at the bottom of the ravine). Pipes were laid down, and the muddy water filled one branch of the ravine after the other, resting for many months and drying out as the water evaporated before another layer was poured. The common people of central Ukraine – called, in reference to the Dnipro, which cuts the country in half, right-bank Ukraine – used to believe that ‘God created smooth ground and Satan made the ravines, dark thickets, and unlit places where spirits hid.’722In Kyiv, Germans and then Soviets continued the work of God, erasing that of the devil.
2324. The filling of the ravines of the Shevchenko district continued all throughout the 1950s. But the winter of 1960-61 was unusually snowy, and in March torrential rain poured down on the city; what’s more, for once the brick factories were exceeding their plan and thus producing a surplus of waste. On 13 March 1961, a poorly built dam, unable to withstand the pressure, gave way in the early hours of the morning, and millions of cubic metres of liquid mud flooded below, inundating the Kurenivka neighbourhood and drowning residents in their ground floors, their basements and their vehicles. The official reckoning of the victims counted 145 dead; the actual number is probably closer to 1,500.8 The images of the neighbourhood filmed after the disaster show an endless sea of mud from which emerge low houses, the cabs of trucks, tramways, trees, poles, and through which the men mobilized to help are slowly slogging. The Soviet authorities compensated the survivors and covered the whole thing up. They also discreetly put an end to the operation of filling in the yary; with the work unfinished, some of the ravines subsisted, the ones that still border or cut through the upper reaches of the park.
25. This place seems smooth. The memory of Babyn Yar, like the remains of the bodies, is underground (Leibniz would have said ‘folded under’). It is a grey, ghostly, hidden memory, but which wells up everywhere, even from a cardboard cup brimming with hot tea at Aroma Kava. You have to scratch the earth, then turn it over under your fingernails, roll it between your fingers, smell it, taste it, see what minuscule clues you can extract from it.
MONUMENTS
26. On 30 May 1955, the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, ‘after walking along Volkhonka past a cordon of Moscow militia regulating a crowd of thousands of people wanting to see the paintings of the great artists’, entered the Pushkin Museum in Moscow to approach Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, seized in 1945 at the Dresden Art Gallery by victorious Red Army troops and, ten years later, about to be sent back to the GDR.9 The painting made his head swim. ‘Afterwards, as I walked down the street, stunned and confused by the power of this sudden impression … I realized that it wasn’t a book, or a piece of music that the spectacle of the young mother with a child in her arms had brought me close to … [but] Treblinka…’10 Grossman goes on to cite his own work, passages from The Hell of Treblinka, a long text written under the shock of his discovery in July 1944 of the traces of the extermination camp. First published in Znamya in November of that same year, the book was introduced as testimony by the Soviet prosecutors during the Nuremberg trials, and was quickly translated into many European languages, including French in 1945.11
It is these pines, this sand, this old tree stump that millions of human eyes saw from their wagons slowly coming up to the platform…. We enter the camp, walk on the earth of Treblinka…. Here they are – the half-rotted shirts of those murdered, shoes, cogwheels from wrist watches, penknives, candlesticks, children’s shoes with red pompoms, lace underwear, a towel with Ukrainian embroidery, pots, canteens, children’s plastic mugs, children’s letters written in pencil, volumes of poetry…
We walk further over the bottomless, swaying earth of 25Treblinka and suddenly we stop. Yellow, wavy thick hair gleaming like copper, the thin, light, lovely hair of a girl, trampled into the ground, and near it some equally blond curls, and then black, heavy braids on the bright sand, and further on more and more…12
Grossman, however, in The Sistine Madonna, does not quote the entire passage, and omits the following phrases from his original text:
The earth undulates under the feet, soft, rich, as if copiously soaked with linseed oil, the bottomless earth of Treblinka, unsteady like the depths of the sea. This wasteland, surrounded by barbed wire, has swallowed more human lives than all the oceans and the seas on the globe since the human race has existed. The earth rejects crushed bone, teeth, objects, papers – it does not want to keep secrets.13
27. You talk to us about secrets. But what are you talking about? What secrets? Look around you. Yes, it’s true, wherever the eye falls in this pretty park, it meets a monument, a stele, a plaque. Yet it hasn’t always been this way. In 1961, despairing of the official refusal to commemorate the site, Yevgeny Yevtushenko began his famous poem thus: ‘Nad Babim Yarom pamiatnikov niet. Over Babiy Yar there are no monuments.’ I met him as well, it seems: looking for the poem in my library, I came across a copy of Predutro (Before Dawn) inscribed to me by the author. It surprised me, I’d always thought it was Voznesenskiy I’d met, at a poetry reading with Allen Ginsberg around 1988, but no, it was Yevtushenko. Be as it may, monuments now proliferate in Babyn Yar, they teem even, and it’s far from over, new ones sprout from the ground all the time, Marina Abramović’s wall today, a kurgan of memory tomorrow. 26Is it in this jumble of monuments that the memory of Babyn Yar survives? Or do they on the contrary also contribute to making it a ‘space of non-memory’?14
2728. Let’s start with a list. It opens with the large bronze monument to the Citizens of the City of Kyiv and the Prisoners of War shot by the German-Fascist invader, inaugurated in 1976. In 1981 a plaque is erected in memory of the Football Players of Dynamo Kyiv, victims of the famous ‘Death Match’, a lovely Soviet fiction we won’t dwell on here.15 The first monument raised after independence, by the Jewish community, is the Menorah, in 1991. Then come: the plaque in memory of the Prisoners of the Syrets Concentration Camp (1991); the cross in memory of the Executed Members of the OUN (1992); the plaque in memory of the Employees of the Podil Tramway Depot who died during the Kurenivka disaster in 1961 (1995); the monument to the executed Prisoners of War and Football Players (1999); a symbolic cemetery, with a memorial cross, dedicated to the German Prisoners of War (1999); the iron crosses for the Executed Priests (2000); a cross in memory of the Executed Priests (2000); a monument to the Children shot in Babyn Yar (2001); a monument to the 751 Patients of the psychiatric hospital who died at the hands of Hitler’s regime in 1941-1942 (2001); a cornerstone of the Jewish Heritage Community Centre lain on the 60th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre (2001); a stela to the 752 [sic] Patients of the psychiatric hospital who died in 1941 at the hands of the Hitlerian occupiers (2003); a plaque in memory of the Specialists of the pychiatric hospital who devoted themselves to their patients (2004); a wooden cross for the 752 Patients as well as the nurses, doctors and interns of the ‘Pavlovka’ psychiatric hospital shot by the Hitlerian occupiers between 1941 28and 1945 [sic], with a list of witnesses (date uncertain); a memorial to the Ostarbeiters or deported workers (2005); a plaque to the memory of the Victims of the Kurenivka tragedy of 1961 (2006); a monument to the Jewish heroine of the Kyiv underground Tetiana Markus (2009); a monument to the writer Anatoliy Kuznetsov (2009); a memorial stela to mark the raising of the monument to the Victims of the Romani genocide (2011); an information panel on the ‘Plan-Scheme of the National Historical Memorial Preserve “Babyn Yar”’ (2011); a stela at the starting point of the ‘Walk of Death’ of the Jews on 29 September 1941 (2011); a cross to the memory of the Victims of the Kurenivka disaster of 1961 (2011); crosses in memory of the Soviet prisoners of war shot in Babyn Yar (2011, 2012); a monumental chapel for the Victims of Babyn Yar (2012); a plaque on a stone ceiling with an inscription near this chapel (2012); a monumental chapel for the Victims of genocide and of the Holocaust of the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples (2012); a memorial panel reading ‘Eternal sorrow. In eternal commemoration of the victims of Nazism, shot at this place in Babyn Yar in 1941-1943’ (2016); a ‘Roma Caravan’ monument (2016); twenty-three information panels on the history of the Babyn Yar tragedy (2016); a memorial sign reading ‘Metasequoia trees donated by RememberUs.org in memory of the Jewish children killed at Babi Yar’ (2017); a monument to Olena Teliha and her colleagues who died for the independence of Ukraine (2017); an alley called the ‘Road of Sorrow’ (2017); a temporary monument called ‘Field of Mirrors’ (2020); four stones with inset photographs called ‘A Glimpse into the Past’ (2020); a monument to the Kurenivka tragedy (2021); a symbolic Synagogue (2021); a ‘Crystal Wall of Tears’ (2021).16 The construction of the ‘Kurgan of Memory’, planned for 292022, has been indefinitely interrupted by the Russian invasion.
29. If the Germans had won the war, would they too have erected in Babyn Yar a monument to their ‘great work’? It’s entirely possible. In his history of the extermination camps of eastern Poland, Yitzhak Arad writes:
… in August 1942, when asked by visiting SS officers whether it would not be better, for reasons of secrecy, to cremate rather than to bury the corpses of the victims of Operation Reinhard, [Odilo] Globocnik [the commander of the said extermination operation] had answered: ‘We ought, on the contrary, to bury bronze tablets stating that it was we who had the courage to carry out this gigantic task.’17
30. Thus has the memory of Babyn Yar become entirely fragmented, forming a kind of kaleidoscope in which everyone contemplates their own dead, while the image of the others remains muddled, diffracted, indistinct.18 Hence the clashes between factions, the polemics, the quarrels on the internet that pollute any attempt to grasp this place in its entirety. Rare are those Ukrainians who can say, like Anton Drobovych, director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP in the Ukrainian acronym), ‘Babyn Yar is a tragedy of the entire community. They killed your neighbour who brought you vareniki [a kind of traditional ravioli] when you were sick, the grandmother who told you fairytales, your dvirnyk [superintendent], your dentist, your teacher… Babyn Yar touched all the inhabitants of Kyiv.’19 If each group claims its piece of Babyn Yar, then the place indeed belongs to everyone, but not to all.
WANDERINGS
31. Having finished our coffee break, Antoine and I were walking along the park’s straight, poplar-lined main alleyway. Many of the monuments in my list are lined up here, on the central divider. Antoine didn’t try to photograph them, they didn’t interest him. As for me, I was gazing at the cottony down masses of poplar seeds, which in both Ukrainian and Russian they call pukh, white streaks rolled up against the edges of the pavement by the breeze, and itching to take out my lighter and set fire to them. Pukh is extraordinarily flammable, and burns so quickly that there’s no danger, the flame runs along the trail of seeds, and the game consists of making it go as far as possible before it dies out. But I was afraid of getting scolded by one of the fierce neighbourhood grandmothers, even though they had probably all done the same thing with their girlfriends back in the days of Brezhnev or Khrushchev, or even Stalin.
32. In front of us, to the right at the end of the lane, rose the fencing surrounding the site of the future kurgan. We headed that way, towards the hill. Our friend Dima Stoikov had shot at this very spot a funny little film for his Babyn Yar Diaries, a series commissioned by the BYHMC and quickly terminated. In this film, two rather decently dressed bomzh, one about fifty, the other younger, rummage about in a concrete pipe emerging from a recess in the grass to extract cans and bottles which they pack into plastic bags. ‘We’re just working,’ the older one insists in Russian while the other one crushes a can. His mirrored sunglasses, masking his eyes, are aimed directly at Dima’s camera: ‘It’s work. It’s real work.’ Women pass calmly by with their strollers in the background while he waves his 31cigarette butt. ‘Living in this country and doing what we do… They should build a monument to us, like that one over there.’ ‘Yes, like that one,’ the younger one interjects. ‘Well,’ the first one continues, ‘not for gypsies, of course.’ ‘We’re not gypsies, pfff.’ ‘Just raise a monument to us, because to survive… to know how to survive…’
3333. The monument the bomzh with the sunglasses was pointing to out of the frame stood there, just in front of us. Antoine didn’t want to photograph it either, but I did, with my phone, to keep a record of it. It must be said that it’s pretty hideous. It represents, in bronze, a kybytka, a large canvas-covered caravan, life-sized and decorated with links of flower garlands, leaning on a pile of rocks and dedicated, as indicate the two plaques hanging from chains, one in Ukrainian, the other in Romany, to the Roma exterminated by the fascists between 1940 and 1945. Like those it commemorates, this caravan wandered a long time before finally finding its place here, not far from the place where three Romany taboras (clans) were shot in 1941, possibly even before the Jews. It had been cast in the late 1990s, financed by private donations, but the municipal council of Kyiv – one might wonder why – resolutely refused its installation under the pretext that its design ‘was incompatible with the overall design of the memorial ensemble’ which at the time did not yet exist. It finally ended up in Kamianets-Podilskyy, to the far west of the country, where it remained for many years.20 In 2004, at the initiative of President Kuchma, the Ukrainian Rada, the parliament, instituted a ‘Day of Memory of the Romany Holocaust’. The date chosen was 2 August, the anniversary of the sadly infamous ‘Night of the Gypsies’ at Auschwitz-Birkenau.21 Obviously, this again set the Roma people apart: as Zemfira Kondur, a Roma activist 34employed by the Council of Europe, pointed out to me, ‘On 29 September, when the president comes to place a wreath at Babyn Yar, it is for the Jews. The Roma people aren’t even invited.’ In 2009, the municipal authorities erected a stela at Babyn Yar on which was written: A MONUMENT TO THE VICTIMS OF THE ROMA HOLOCAUST WILL BE INSTALLED ON THIS SPOT; a year later, it was destroyed by unknown people. It wasn’t until 2016 that the ‘Roma caravan’ was moved from Kamianets-Podilskyy to Kyiv to join the other monuments in the park.
34. Even though the Nazi persecution of the Roma and Sinti peoples, a subject that obsessed Himmler but did not interest Hitler at all, remained much more haphazard in western Europe than that of the Jews, it seems to have been methodical in the occupied territories of the USSR as well as in Yugoslavia. The Ukrainian scholar Mykhailo Tyahlyy has inventoried 140 mass killing sites of Roma on the present-day territory of Ukraine. But after the war, as he shows, the Soviet memory of the persecutions and massacres of the Roma people took a different turn from that of the Jews: rather than erasure, an insidious form of blame. Whereas during the war many Roma had fought in partisan units as well as in the Red Army, the representations in the Soviet press, after 1945, ‘formed, albeit inadvertently, the widespread notion that the Nazis had persecuted the Roma because of their supposed “asocial” character. This in the end contributed at least to the partial shifting of blame for their persecution onto the victims themselves. Such notions … were preserved until the collapse of the USSR and were inherited by the mass consciousness of the population of independent Ukraine.’22 The government is making some efforts: before the Russian invasion, the Ministry 35of Education had asked for the help of the Council of Europe to codify the Romany language in Latin characters, so as to be able to begin to educate the children in their own language. But discrimination is still intense, especially in Transcarpathia, a mountainous region of the Carpathians adjoining Hungary and Romania: ‘You can recognize them from the colour of their skin, their names, their clothing,’ Zemfira Kondur told me. ‘They don’t have the right to leave their camps, the children don’t go to school, they’re not allowed into bars…’ In 2018, anti-Roma pogroms, proudly uploaded on YouTube, still regularly took place in Kyiv, organized by S14 and other neo-Nazi groups.
35. From the kybytka we headed towards the hill. On our right, in the little copse, stretched a long wall made of wooden beams and black cloth, a full-scale model representing the future anthracite wall by Marina Abramović, still seeking its definitive placement. Workers were busy behind it, shadows visible against the light – now that interested Antoine, and I waited a while as he took some pictures. Beyond the copse, below the hill, lay the ‘Field of Mirrors’, the first creation of the BYHMC, but we’d already seen it and so we climbed the hill, straight ahead to the Menorah, a large bronze seven-branched candelabra raised on stone steps often decorated as tradition will have it with little pebbles, carnations (which are not Jewish at all), Israeli flags and stuffed animals, and flanked by two stone tablets, one in Hebrew, the other in Ukrainian, bearing the Biblical inscription THE VOICE OF THY BROTHER’S BLOOD CRYETH UNTO ME FROM THE GROUND. Ah, Cain, his resentment, his anger, his wandering: what then was he doing here? Would the Jews killed in Babyn Yar have been the brothers of their murderers? A curious 36interpretation. To tell the truth, and let me be forgiven for saying so, this monument isn’t much better than the kybytka or Marina Abramović’s wall, finally inaugurated in October 2021. Oh sad fate of monuments in Babyn Yar, strewn throughout the setting only to blend into it straight away, as unremarkable as a wastepaper basket, and less useful than a public bench. At least this one has the honour of being both the first post-Soviet monument and the first Jewish monument installed here.
3736. And what about the Jews, then? We’ll get to that. Let us simply note for the time being that during the long memorial desert of the Soviet era, the Jewish communities of Kyiv were champing at the bit at the idea of finally erecting their own monument as soon as circumstances allowed. The Rada’s ratification, on 26 August 1991 (a few days after the failed coup in Moscow), of a Declaration of Independence of Ukraine provided them with the opportunity they were waiting for. The Menorah was erected even before this independence came into effect, in December with the official dissolution of the USSR. At the same time as democracy, unregulated capitalism and the reign of the oligarchs, memorial competition was slowly taking root in Babyn Yar.
FOLDS (IN THE LAND)
37. I’m being harsh about all these monuments: it’s true, their clumsy pathos offends me. But right behind the Menorah stood a very beautiful one, the fruit of a BYHMC project about to be inaugurated a few days after our walk: a little wooden synagogue designed as a children’s pop-up book, which, like a giant toy, opened and closed with 38a crank-powered handle. A dozen artists, scattered about on scaffolding, were still putting the finishing touches on the decorations of the walls and ceiling, naïve traditional paintings of the vanished synagogues of Ukraine. A few days later we would come in the evening for a test run as a guard slowly turned the wheel in front of a handful of spectators, it was beautiful to watch the ceiling folding in half while one of the walls closed against the other, the soft orangey light of the interior slowly shrinking in the dark blue of the twilight before finally disappearing.
38. Antoine photographed the synagogue, its very simple façade seemed to please him. I left him there and walked around the building. Just beyond it opened up the end of a little ravine, not very long but with steep, deep sides, a wooded gash ripping into the hill. I went up to the edge and contemplated it, dreaming of hurtling down the side but finding it too steep. Antoine, who had joined me, proved to be bolder than me, and thus, hanging from one tree to another and taking photos all the while, did he reach the bottom, having scattered part of his equipment on the way, but unhurt. Later, examining an outline of Babyn Yar superimposed over a contemporary map, I realized that this little ravine and the long cliff that continued it to the right used to form the eastern crest of the filled-in yar, north of the western spur where the massacre took place. Vasily Grossman – a Ukrainian Jew from Berdychiv whose mother was murdered, along with the city’s entire Jewish population, two weeks before the Grosse Aktion of Kyiv – has described this ravine as it existed before the massacre. Krymov, a political commissar who has come from Moscow, reaches Kyiv on the eve of the fall of the city. 39
40The driver stopped the car at the edge of the city, and Krymov continued on foot. He walked alongside a deep and long ravine with clay scree and stopped, involuntarily rejoicing in the silence and charm of the early morning. Yellow leaves covered the ground, the morning sun illumined the autumn foliage. The air that morning was exceptionally light. The cry of the birds seemed only to ripple the deep and clear surface of the transparent silence. The sun shone on the clay slopes of the ravine. Darkness and light, silence and birdsong, the warmth of the sun and the coolness of the air all created a marvellous sensation – it seemed as if the kind old men from a children’s fairytale were climbing the slope with quiet footsteps.
Krymov turned off the road and walked sweating between the trees. He saw an elderly woman in a dark blue coat climbing the hill, a white canvas bag on her shoulders…. Krymov asked the way to Kreshchatik, and the woman told him:
‘You’ve gone the wrong way, from the ravine, Babiy Yar, you should have gone left, but now you’re headed towards Podol, go back to the ravine and go by the Jewish cemetery, along Melnika Street, then down Lvov Street…’23
39. I slowly walked around the little ravine, going down the hill on the left to join Antoine at the bottom. The synagogue, from here, was no longer visible, there were only the trees, ranged in tiers to the top of the ridge and leaning towards each other to hide the sky. I felt very small, I had the impression, for the first time here, that I was almost touching something. This desolate fold of land spoke to me in a quiet voice, yet far clearer than the jabber of the monuments.
WAY OF THE CROSS
40. Finally we climbed back up, going back the long way around. We passed the Menorah and the synagogue and just after there was a cross, a tall wooden cross topped with a triangle and decorated with a lantern and a little sculpted Christ, standing in the centre of a circle of flowers. I lingered there while Antoine continued to follow a path between the trees, along the ridge of the little yar. I soon lost sight of him and stayed there for a moment, trying to decipher the gilt text, partially erased archaic letters engraved in the marble at the foot of the cross. But already Antoine was calling me and I followed him under the trees to join him. He was pointing to a hand-painted inscription on a small black cross made of metal tubes, its base decorated with plastic flowers. I translated for him: ‘Protoierey Pavel Ostrensky shot 6 November 1941.’ A little further on there was another, dedicated to the Skhimonakhinya Esfir (Esther), shot on the same day ‘by the fascists’. The ridge of the yar was now curving inwards to form a long cliff overhanging the lower part of the park. The woods, here, were denser, the path snaked between the trees, slippery. Further on, a third metal cross, almost hidden in the middle of a copse, presented, in Ukrainian, a more general commemoration: IN THIS PLACE PEOPLE WERE KILLED IN 1941. MAY GOD GIVE REST TO THEIR SOULS. Here the path forked, disappearing to the left into the trees to follow the cliff, or looping back towards the large wooden cross. Behind the forest, on this side, a group of wooden structures was visible: a church, a chapel, an open belfry with a dozen little bronze bells visible on the upper floor. 42
41. A plaque on the chapel gave the name of the place: ‘Memorial church in honour of the icon of the Mother of God “Joy to all those who weep”.’ The door of the church opened onto a large wooden hall flooded with light, its walls covered with modern icons in gilt frames. A lady in a scarf, immersed in her phone, guarded a little shop at the entrance offering books, pamphlets, crucifixes and reproductions of icons. Opposite it, in the midst of various posters and leaflets, there was a sign in Russian printed from a computer and placed under plastic in a cheap frame. I’ll take the trouble of translating it here:
NOT COMMEMORATED IN THIS CHURCH:
→ For health
• The Unbaptized
• Followers of Other Faiths (Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Catholics)
• Sectarians (Baptists, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the sect of Olga Asauliak)
• Schismatics (followers of the Kyiv Patriarchate)
• People who follow extrasensory therapists, witches, healers, ‘grandmothers’
→ For repose
• Suicides (and also those who die of an overdose of alcohol, of drugs)
42. Maksym Yakover, the director of the BYHMC, had already told me about this church. It had been built illegally in the early 2010s, during the presidency of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych, and the authorities at the time had chosen to close their eyes to it, since it was affiliated with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate – not to be confused with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine of Metropolitan 43
