CRUELTY AND THE BEAST

In last month’s issue, Mar­tin Kirby men­tioned a book called ‘The Ravine’, a his­tory of the mas­sacres at the Babyn Yar ravine (now in­side Kyiv’s city lim­its) dur­ing World War II, where the Ger­mans shot over 100,000 Jews, So­viet POWs and Gyp­sies be­tween 1941 and 1943.

It was by way of an at­tempt to un­der­stand this ca­pac­ity of human be­ings to treat other mem­bers of their species as if they were worse than cock­roaches, that I started read­ing about the Shoah when I was sev­en­teen. The 127 books I now have on the sub­ject have come in handy when try­ing to un­der­stand sim­i­larly mas­sive atroc­i­ties that have taken place in my own life­time: Cam­bo­dia, Rwanda, Bosnia, the DRC, Chech­nia, Syria… And yet, now that the atroc­i­ties that are still tak­ing place in Ukraine have been con­firmed by hu­man­i­tar­ian or­gan­i­sa­tions such as HRW and dozens of ac­cred­ited in­ter­na­tional jour­nal­ists, I still find it hard to un­der­stand how sol­diers from a neigh­bour­ing coun­try, 11% of whose pop­u­la­tion (16.5 mil­lion peo­ple) have fam­ily mem­bers in Ukraine, can rape, tor­ture, bomb schools, hos­pi­tals and apart­ment blocks, and kill large num­bers of POWs and civil­ians, in­clud­ing women, chil­dren and the el­derly.

Then I read the 128th book in my Holo­caust col­lec­tion (‘In Broad Day­light’), about the 1941-43 mass shoot­ings of Jews in Ukraine, Be­larus, the Baltic states and oc­cu­pied Rus­sia (a total of ap­prox­i­mately 2 mil­lion peo­ple, in hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent lo­ca­tions, from large towns to tiny ham­lets), known as the ‘Holo­caust by bul­lets’. The book is based on ten years of painstak­ing re­search by a French Catholic priest, Fa­ther Patrick Des­bois, and his team. Not a sin­gle de­tail is spared: the rapes, by Ger­mans, that took place the evening be­fore the mur­ders, the round­ing up of the local Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion, the march to the freshly dug ditches, the or­ders to strip naked and lie down in those ditches, the shoot­ings, the killing of ba­bies by swing­ing them by the feet to pick up enough cen­trifugual force so as to smash their heads against a tree or a rock, the fill­ing of the ditches (the few sur­vivors were thus buried alive), the loot­ing of the clothes of the mur­dered.

Be­cause Fa­ther Des­bois re­lies ei­ther on eye­wit­ness state­ments by peo­ple who saw and some­times par­tic­i­pated in the mur­ders, or de­po­si­tions from wit­nesses taken by the Ger­man or So­viet au­thor­i­ties only a few years after the events, his book puts read­ers right into the cen­tre of the hor­ror, as if they were in­vis­i­ble by­standers. The in­ter­vie­wees, over four thou­sand of them, some­times weep as they re­call the names of friends and neigh­bours who were mur­dered, or talk coldly about ‘the Jews’, in a way that sug­gests it made per­fect sense that they were all shot in the back of the head. What­ever the re­ac­tion, they make one thing very clear: all the tor­tur­ing, rap­ing, mur­der­ing and loot­ing were car­ried out not by crazed psy­chopaths but by peo­ple who in any other con­text would be con­sid­ered nor­mal.

So why did they do what they did? Ac­cord­ing to Des­bois: ‘A geno­cide is human be­ings who mur­der other human be­ings while pre­tend­ing to “save” the world by killing’. To judge from com­ments made by some of the Russ­ian oc­cu­piers to Ukrain­ian civil­ians, the for­mer claim to be­lieve they are sav­ing Rus­sia from a Ukraine which has been taken over by ‘Nazis’ and ‘na­tion­al­ists’. But as Dubois says, in re­al­ity they are pre­tend­ing, be­cause if they re­ally be­lieved what they said, they would frater­nise with Ukrain­ian civil­ians in the ‘lib­er­ated’ areas, hav­ing saved them from a ghastly gov­ern­ment in Kyiv, in­stead of mur­der­ing, rap­ing and rob­bing them. As far as Ukraine is con­cerned, we don’t need a book like Fa­ther Des­bois’s to feel we’re in the cen­tre of the hor­ror. As Eu­ro­peans who are alive today, we re­ally are in the cen­tre of it. And in broad day­light, too.