LA MEMORIA

We walk past small ledges chis­elled into a swell of red sand­stone al­most every day. Deep in the val­ley there is a nar­row di­vide where the track runs be­tween two dusty, ruby walls of sed­i­men­tary rock sculp­tured and smoothed thou­sands of years ago by a mighty river.

The man-made shelves are a per­ma­nent tes­ti­mony to the evils of Nazism, to­tal­i­tar­i­an­ism and despots, but also to the human spirit, re­solve and mem­ory, for this ravine of shad­ows and si­lence was once a sanc­tu­ary from bombs and mass mur­der.

The ledges sup­ported beams and crude cover be­tween the walls of red, where chil­dren and the el­derly were brought as the Ger­man Luft­waffe and Ital­ian air force bombed homes in our vil­lage, one com­mu­nity among many, dur­ing the sav­agery of civil war. Civil­ians were prime tar­gets for Hitler’s Con­dor Le­gion and their fa­nat­i­cal tac­ti­cians, who would com­mand and wreak havoc and mis­ery dur­ing the sec­ond world war. Cor­bera, 30 kilo­me­tres south of us, still bears wit­ness and the scars to the in­san­ity of ter­ror, as do Bel­chite in Aragon, Guer­nica in the Basque lands and many other com­mu­ni­ties. The Nazi-co­or­di­nated mur­ders of thou­sands of peo­ple in Barcelona through in­dis­crim­i­nate bomb­ing were a dire por­tent of what was to fol­low across the con­ti­nent.

There is a to­tal­i­tar­ian state at war in Eu­rope now, and it isn’t, of course, Ukraine. Putin’s iron grip and his grasp on re­al­ity and how to wage the vital in­for­ma­tion war are vis­i­bly slip­ping. To jus­tify Nazi tac­tics by claim­ing to free Ukraine from Nazi rule is be­yond mad­ness.

Ukraine’s de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected pres­i­dent is Jew­ish. Most peo­ple now know that. You may not know that his grand­fa­ther was one of four broth­ers. The other three were mur­dered by the Nazis dur­ing the holo­caust, as were many of the pres­i­dent’s rel­a­tives.

Within the city lim­its of Kyiv (but 80 years ago be­yond the urban area) there is an­other ravine. In June 1941, be­fore Hitler’s Op­er­a­tion Bar­barossa in­va­sion of the So­viet Union, Ukraine was home to the largest Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion on the con­ti­nent. Of those that could not flee – pre­dom­i­nantly chil­dren, the sick and old – less than 2 per­cent sur­vived the geno­cide. In just two days in Sep­tem­ber 1941, more than 33,000 were mur­dered in that ravine.

I have or­dered and am seek­ing the strength to read Wendy Lower’s as­ton­ish­ing, vital and metic­u­lously re­searched book on the Ukraine holo­caust of 1941. The Ravine, A Fam­ily, A Pho­to­graph, A Holo­caust Mas­sacre Re­vealed, (Mariner Books, Feb­ru­ary 2022, ISBN-10 ? : ? 0358627931) faces up to the des­per­ate truth, with the dig­nity of names and sto­ries, not only num­bers, set­ting out, as the Smith­son­ian re­view de­fined it, “to hold the per­pe­tra­tors ac­count­able while restor­ing the de­ceased’s dig­nity and hu­man­ity”.

The same has to be true of now.

The ravine where so many were killed is known as Babyn Yar, and it is not for­got­ten. Next year, a holo­caust memo­r­ial cen­tre was due to open on the site. As many as 100,000 died there. The Russ­ian sol­diers must be close to it now.

Last words must go to the non-gov­ern­men­tal in­ter­na­tional foun­da­tion de­ter­mined to keep the mem­ory of that ravine alive. The echo car­ries.

“Eighty years have passed since the tragedy at Babyn Yar. Babyn Yar was not for­got­ten, but in the USSR its mem­ory was dis­cour­aged and in­ten­tion­ally dis­torted. The truth about the dis­ap­pear­ance of the bright, vi­brant world of pre-war Kyiv did not meet the ide­o­log­i­cal tasks of the So­viet regime. Now, in Ukraine that has gained true in­de­pen­dence, it has be­come pos­si­ble to re­vive this mem­ory, to flesh it out, to res­cue from obliv­ion the names of the vic­tims and the right­eous who saved them.

“Know­ing the truth about our past is im­por­tant for each of us who grew up on the blood-soaked land of Eu­rope. With­out know­ing and un­der­stand­ing the past, a free so­ci­ety can­not live a fully-fledged life, nor can it build a fu­ture.”

https://​babynyar.​org/​en