Babi Yar - Бабий Яр

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone. 
I am afraid.
            Today I am as old in years 
as all the Jewish people. 

Now I seem to be
                a Jew. 
Here I plod through ancient Egypt. 
Here I perish crucified, on the cross, 
and to this day I bear the scars of nails.

I seem to be
            Dreyfus. 
The Philistine 
              is both informer and judge. 
I am behind bars.
                Beset on every side. 
Hounded, 
       spat on,
              slandered.
Squealing, dainty ladies 

 in flounced Brussels lace
  stick their parasols into my face.

I seem to be then
                a young boy in Byelostok. 
Blood runs, spilling over the floors. 
The barroom rabble-rousers 
give off a stench of vodka and onion. 
A boot kicks me aside, helpless. 
In vain I plead with these pogrom bullies. 
While they jeer and shout,
                         "Beat the Yids. Save Russia!" 
some grain-marketeer beats up my mother.

0 my Russian people!
                   I know 
                         you 
are international to the core. 

But those with unclean hands 
have often made a jingle of your purest name. 
I know the goodness of my land. 
How vile these anti-Semites-
                            without a qualm 
they pompously called themselves 
the Union of the Russian People! 

I seem to be
            Anne Frank 
transparent 
           as a branch in April. 
And I love.
          And have no need of phrases. 
My need 
       is that we gaze into each other. 
How little we can see
                     or smell! 
We are denied the leaves, 
                         we are denied the sky. 
Yet we can do so much --
                        tenderly 
embrace each other in a darkened room.

They're coming here?
            Be not afraid. 

                       Those are the booming 
sounds of spring:
                 spring is coming here. 
Come then to me.
               Quick, give me your lips.
Are they smashing down the door?
                                No, it's the ice breaking ... 

The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar. 
The trees look ominous, 
                      like judges. 
Here all things scream silently, 
                               and, baring my head, 
slowly I feel myself 
                    turning gray. 

And I myself 
            am one massive, soundless scream 
above the thousand thousand buried here.

I am 
     each old man 
                 here shot dead. 

I am 
    every child
               here shot dead.

Nothing in me
             shall ever forget! 

The "Internationale," 

             let it 
                            thunder 
when the last anti-Semite on earth 
is buried forever. 

In my blood there is no Jewish blood. 
In their callous rage, all anti-Semites 
must hate me now as a Jew. 

For that reason
                I am a true Russian!

Babi Yar Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet. Krutoi obryv, kak gruboye nadgrobye. Mne strashno. Mne sevodnya stolko let, Kak samomu yevreiskomu narodu. Mne kazhetsya seichas - ya iudei. Vot ya bredu po drevnemu Egiptu. A vot ya, na kreste raspyati, gibnu. I do sikh por na mne - sledy gvozdei. Mne kazhestya, shot Dreifus - eto ya. Meshchanstvo - moi donoschik i sudya. Ya za reshotkoi. Ya popal v koltso, Zatravlennyi, oplyovannyi, obolgannyi, I admochki s bryusselskimi oborkami, Vizzha, zontami tychut mne v litso. Mne kahzetsya, ya - malchik v Belostoke. Krov lyotsya, rastekayas po polam, Beschinstvuyut vozhdi traktimoi stoiki I pakhnut vodkoi s lukom popolam. Ya sapogom otbroshennyi, bessilnyi. Naprasno ya pogromshchikov moyu. Pod gogot: "Bei zhidov, spasai Rossiyu!" Labaznik izbiyavet mat moyu. O russki moi narod, ya znayu ty Po sushchnosti internazionalen. No chasto te, chi ruki nechisty Tvoim chiteishim imenem bryatsali. Ya znayu dobrotu moyei zemli. Kak podlo, shto i zhilochkoi ne drognuv. Antisemity narekli sebya "Soyuzom Russkovo Naroda!" Mne kazhetsya ya - eto Anna Frank, Prozrachnaya, kak vetochka v aprele, I ya lyublyu, i mne ne nado fraz, No nado, shtob drug v druga my smotreli. Kak malo mozhno videt, obonyat! Nelzya nam listyev I nelzya nam neba, No mozhno ochen mnogo - eto nezhno Drug druga v tyomnoi komnate obnyat. "Syuda idut!" "Ne bosa, eto guly Samoy vesny. Ona syuda idyot. Idi ko mne, Dai mne skoreye guby!" "Lomayut dver!" "Nyet, eto ledokhod..." Nad Babim Yarom shelest dikikh trav, Derevya smotryat grozno, po-sudeiski. Zdes molcha vsyo krichit, i, shapku snyav, Ya chuvstvuyu, kak medlenno sedeyu. I sam ya, kak sploshnoi bezzvuchnyi krik, Nad tysyachami tysyach pogrebyonnykh. Ya - kazhdyi zdes rasstrelyanni starik. Ya - kazhdyi zdes rasstrelyanni rebyonok. Nichto vo mne pro eto ne zabudet. "Internatsional" pust progremit. Kogda naveki pokhoronen budet Posledni na zemle antisemit. Yevreiskoi krovi nyet v krovi moyei, No nenavisten zloboi zaskoruzloi Ya vsem antisemitam, kak yevrei. I potomu ya - nastoyashchi russki!

Бабий Яр Над Бабьим Яром памятников нет. Крутой обрыв, как грубое надгробье. Мне страшно. Мне сегодня столько лет, как самому еврейскому народу. Мне кажется сейчас – я иудей. Вот я бреду по древнему Египту. А вот я, на кресте распятый, гибну, и до сих пор на мне – следы гвоздей. Мне кажется, что Дрейфус – это я. Мещанство – мой доносчик и судья. Я за решеткой. Я попал в кольцо. Затравленный, оплеванный, оболганный. И дамочки с брюссельскими оборками, визжа, зонтами тычут мне в лицо. Мне кажется – я мальчик в  Белостоке. Кровь льется, растекаясь по полам. Бесчинствуют вожди трактирной стойки и пахнут водкой с луком пополам. Я, сапогом отброшенный, бессилен. Напрасно я погромщиков молю. Под гогот: “Бей жидов, спасай Россию!”- насилует лабазник мать мою. О, русский мой народ! – Я знаю – ты По сущности интернационален. Но часто те, чьи руки нечисты, твоим чистейшим именем бряцали. Я знаю доброту твоей земли. Как подло, что, и жилочкой не  дрогнув, антисемиты пышно нарекли себя “Союзом русского народа”! Мне кажется – я – это Анна Франк, прозрачная, как веточка в апреле. И я люблю, И мне не надо фраз. Мне надо, чтоб друг в друга мы смотрели. Как мало можно видеть, обонять! Нельзя нам листьев и нельзя нам неба. Но можно очень много – это нежно друг друга в темной комнате обнять. Сюда идут? Не бойся — это гулы самой весны – она сюда идет. Иди ко мне. Дай мне скорее губы. Ломают дверь? Нет – это ледоход… Над Бабьим Яром шелест диких трав. Деревья смотрят грозно, по-судейски. Все молча здесь кричит, и, шапку сняв, я чувствую, как медленно седею. И сам я, как сплошной беззвучный  крик, над тысячами тысяч  погребенных. Я – каждый здесь расстрелянный старик. Я – каждый здесь расстрелянный ребенок. Ничто во мне про это не забудет! “Интернационал” пусть прогремит, когда навеки похоронен будет последний на земле антисемит. Еврейской крови нет в крови моей. Но ненавистен злобой заскорузлой я всем антисемитам, как еврей, и потому – я настоящий русский!

Ancestral voices seem to demand this poem, this one and this alone, from among the many Yevtushenko poems that I might have chosen; ancestral voices, but also the specific voice of Max Jacob, my narrator in "Going To The Wall", for whom this poem became enormously symbolic in the narrative both of the Jews and the non-Jews who underwent the catastrophic experiment of Communism in the Soviet Union. There are other Yevtushenko poems, or lines from other poems, which I love more; the poem he calls "Lies", for instance, and which ends with the wonderfully, wisely didactic lines:

                                      Forgive no error you recognise,

                                      it will repeat itself, increase,

                                      and afterwards our pupils

                                      will not forgive what we forgave 

lines that could only have been written by one who had survived the sort of totalitarian assault against ideals and values and morality which was the Stalin Terror, and who emerged, not simply "unvanquished and unyielding" (in Virginia Woolf's stupendous phrase), but with a sense of duty and responsibility even heightened.

There are, of course, many in the west who chastise Yevtushenko for not being another Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn, let alone another Mandelstam; and from our perspective of moral and material superiority it is very easy to criticise, in much the same way that one could criticise John the Baptist for not being Jesus. Whatever his failings, however many his compromises, I suspect it was no easy thing just to be Yevtushenko.

I love the gushing sentimentality of "Zima Junction" (Yevtushenko was born there, in 1933), not for itself, but for the glorious irony of it in the face of the reality of Stalinist collectivisation; like the extraordinary tale of Sartre being granted a performance licence for "Les Mouches" by the authorities in Nazi-occupied Paris, or Camus likewise for the publication of "La Peste", the fools completely oblivious to the real meaning, the allegory, the intent behind the irony, the amazing courage of the protest. As Yevtushenko expresses it, in "Later":                

                               It would be far more terrible to mistake
                               a friend
                               than to mistake
                               an enemy

The sentimentality is plain in "Babi Yar" too, but here it is not intended ironically. Some of the sentimentality is hard to take; "I know the goodness of my country" for example, which is simply mendacious. What has upset western critics though is none of this; rather it is the several attempts at symbiotic empathy ("I... plodding through ancient Egypt… I... a boy in Byelostok… I ... seem to be Anna Frank…") which, they say, achieve a measure of sympathetic identification, but no more. How much more do they want? He cannot undo the incident. He cannot suddenly become a biologically-generated and therefore halachically-acceptable Jew. He is the most that he can be: an atheist citizen of the Soviet Union, who believes in a Socialism rather different from the one his country is practising, who is very angry at what was done to his people by the Nazis, and who wants that wickedness recognised by his own people, in full, including the naming of the victims.

And yet. And yet. How, one wonders, might Shelley have composed it – I choose Shelley only because, while there are no obvious similarities of style, the political engagement is most definitely comparable: Shelley who wrote the sentimental eulogy "Adonais" for his friend John Keats, but whose own poetry elsewhere challenges Keats at the very fundamentals, because sometimes Truth is Ugliness, Ugliness Truth, and this too is something that you need to know on Earth, and find a response to. Not that far from Shelley's "Call To Freedom" to the intentions that Yevtushenko still dreams of espousing when he makes reference here to the Internationale.

But I am assuming that you know what happened, and perhaps that too is a mistake. On September 29th and 30th, 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries, under the guidance of members of Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing unit) C, and specifically Sonderkommando 4a, whose only mission in life and war was to identify Jews and either deport them to the camps or deal with them in situ, murdered exactly 33,771 members of the Jewish population of Kiev in the Ukraine, including women with babies and elderly people, at Babi Yar, a ravine to the northwest of that city. Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln and Kommandeur Otto Rasch (see illustration above) took the decision and gave the orders. During the months that followed, all other Jews in the city were rounded up, as well as Roma, Communists, and captured Soviet soldiers, and their bodies were also dumped in the trench at Babi Yar. By the end of the operation, more than a hundred thousand were no longer accountable for; by the end of the war more than a million Jews in the Ukraine had been murdered.

I have said "no longer accountable for", preferring it to other options, because refusing to account for them was precisely what happened in the Soviet Union for the next several decades, and it was this refusal, this denial of history, which drove Yevtushenko to write the poem. He rails against the Soviet regime, which, Bartleby-like, preferred not to acknowledge what had happened; and when it did reluctantly acknowledge it, insisted that those who died were "Soviet citizens", which of course they were, but refusing to acknowledge that the vast majority were rather more specifically "Jewish Soviet citizens", and that the reason for the massacre by the Nazis was their Judaism, not their Sovietism, which frankly most of them detested just as much as they detested Nazism.

To hear Yevtushenko reading the poem, in the original Russian at first, and then in English translation, and with some splendid echoes and doublings to create the sense of multiple voices, click here for its page at YouTube. The background music is from Shostakovich's setting of the poem, the 1st movement of his 13th Symphony.

The (slightly more than full - Yevtushenko appears to have made some small late modifications to the text in this version) Russian original, likewise read by the poet, can be heard here, wonderfully passionate, a true actor, not just a poem-reader; at times you suspect he's been listening to the Shostakovich and wants to be the bass chazan. Which is why playing some of the unworded sections of the Shostakovich at the same time, to give it an even more intense background, is even better. Click here for the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra performing it, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin. (If I could find a version by a Kiev orchestra, wouldn't that be so much more appropriate? If you have one, please let me know.)

When exactly Yevtushenko wrote the poem is unknown, and probably unknowable; he published it during that brief twilight in 1961, when Kruschev opened the curtain to reveal an iron window still locked and sealed behind it, the same moment which allowed the publication of Solzhenitsyn too, though not many others, and still an act of courage, because who with exerience of the Stalin years was going to believe that twilights automatically dawn?

For Shostakovich to set it to music the following year - its first public performance was in Moscow on December 18th 1962 - especially given the troubles he had already had with previous symphonies, even more so. What happened to that public performance is worth reading about, but to save me the trouble of writing it, the conductor Mark Wigglesworth has already done so - you can read his piece here. What happened to the twilight was predictable: a brief moment, the fall of Kruschev, and new man Brezhnev's first act was to have the seal on the window tightened, and then shut the curtain.

One last observation. Yevtushenko states that "no monument...". At the time of writing, indeed no. Today, as the last illustration above confirms, there is one, but it took a long time. Until 1976 indeed, when a memorial was erected at the site to honor the "citizens of Kiev" killed there - still no change to the designation, even if the event was at last acknowledged. Only in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was a menorah-shaped monument to the Jewish victims finally erected at the site.

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