51 years ago a Russian/Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem “Babiy Yar”.
I am convinced that no other poem in the Soviet Union/Russia had the same effect as Babiy Yar. Ever…
It was like a nuke exploded in the Soviet Union. For so many people it was a breath of fresh air, a word of truth said in the empire of lie. For many others it was what a red cloth is to the enraged bull…
No, I do not think that this is the best poem ever written in Russian… but this poem stands out not on its literary qualities, it stands out and stands tall on its human qualities.
There are rare moments in life, when great people overcome fear and hostility and rise to the occasion, and create the unforgettable. This was a poem Babiy Yar.
Babiy Yar was a ravine not far from Kiev (the capital city of Ukraine), which is the site of mass grave. On September 29-30 1941 33,771 Jews were methodically exterminated there by Nazi.
“The massacre was the largest single mass killing for which the Nazi regime and its collaborators were responsible during its campaign against the Soviet Union[1] and is considered to be "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust".
It was so long ago, it was 10 years before I was even born, but this pain is always with me. One of those 33,771 victims was my grandmother. I am not sentimental, but when I think about it, I am distraught…
In the Soviet Union the tradition was not to acknowledge holocaust, not to acknowledge that Nazi were killing Jews, but classify it as atrocities against Soviet people.
With their own troubled relationship with Jews, they did not want the memory of what happened in Babiy Yar. This ravine was an unmarked place. Those who tried to raise their voice about a monument, were quickly shut down... Those who knew about Babiy Yar, were silent.
Years later the authorities started using the ravine as dump place. When Yevtushenko’s friend, who witnessed the massacre as a boy, brought him to Babiy Yar, Yevtushenko was stunned seeing trucks coming one after another and dumping that smelly garbage into he ravine… Call it adding insult to injury…
That evening Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote Babiy Yar.
It is not a poem about making a mass grave a dumpsite …
It is not a poem about cold-blooded killers, who orchestrated this massacre…
It is not about only Babiy Yar…
It is about anti-Semitism, including Soviet/Russian anti-Semitism…
It is about difficult and courageous act of being human….
My late mom, a psychiatrist, was not a poetry fan. All she read were medical books and magazines. I was 10 years old, so all this was far from me. But I remember that my mom loved Yevtushenko.
She was carrying a hand written poem with her at all times… in her purse, in her pocket… that poem was her monument to her mother.
It is my monument to my grandmother…
Here is the link to an English language translation of the poem. I could not read it, it is not even close to what I read in Russian, but this is all I have.
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