Anything But A Walk In The Park – From Daylight To Darkness: A Trip To Babi Yar (Travels In Eastern Europe #53b)

Trying to find the actual site of Babi Yar was rather difficult though I was most definitely in Babi Yar Park. I had expected to find some directional signage or ominous clues to the ravine’s location, instead what I found were people strolling around a rather large public park filled with deciduous trees. Autumn had yet to take hold despite the season, thus the trees were still thick with leaves. I was surrounded by greenery. It was hard enough to believe that 33,771 people had been executed at Babi Yar in just two days less than four generations ago. It was even harder to believe that such a thing could have happened in such a tranquil place.  Of course, places can change radically over time and the area around Babi Yar Park was quite different from what it had been in 1941. On the edge of the park was a large television station for Kiev. This building had been effectively constructed in place of the Jewish cemetery which had predated the war.

Babi Yar Ravine

Dangerous Intuition – An Unfathomable Depth
The few black and white photographs taken at Babi Yar during the time of the massacre looked foreboding. A bleak, black and white landscape of dirt and grime, a polar opposite of the present. While the nature that surrounded me was inviting. I spent many minutes walking down one paved pathway after another. There were many elderly pensioners out for a walk. The deeper I went into the forested parkland the less I heard the city traffic on nearby streets. I began to believe that I was either in the wrong place or a coverup had been carried out. Was nature hiding the area’s history? Using the under and overgrowth as a cover. Straight and narrow paths led in a multitude of directions, these only took me deeper into the woodland.

My attempts to locate the ravine finally sent me off trail. I made my way through woods until I saw a higher point ahead of me. Walking towards this small prominence I came out into an area where the earth began to rise on both sides. I suddenly found myself standing in a ravine. I was unsure whether this was Babi Yar or not. I did not see any memorials or monuments. Coincidentally, the ravine and surrounding woods looked like a place I used to play as a child. Could one of the worst massacres in human history really have occurred in this place, it looked so familiar, so non-descript, startlingly average. The ravine was no more than 50 meters wide at its greatest extent. As I headed up into it, the space between the earthen walls narrowed. About this time another man came walking around the edge. Neither of us acknowledged the other, but I wanted to ask him of this really was Babi Yar? And if so, how could he go for a nonchalant walk in this part of the park.

A Memorial – Babi Yar Park

Deep Disturbance – On The Ground & In The Ground
It occurred to me that I was might be standing where thousands of bodies were once stacked. In a bit of fearful curiosity my eyes darted from one side to the other looking for traces of bones. I did not see any, though nearby tree roots protruding from the earth made for macabre imaginations. And still I had no idea if I was in the correct spot, though some strange intuition began to creep over me. Like the feeling one has when they are in danger or about to be confronted with some horribly unsettling truth. Making my way to where the ravine started I forced to scale the steep earthen walls. Once at the top I began to look for any signs on the ground that this was Babi Yar. Over in some brambles and weeds I found a double cross erected from metal posts. I had to be close. Then I caught sight of a monument where the woods gave way to a clearing. There were a couple of people standing there, in front a monument with large menorah. At this point I knew that the ravine I had just walked up through was Babi Yar.

The confirmation was deeply unsettling. I soon made my way back to the precipice of Babi Yar. Peering down into it I tried, but could not imagine the endless stream of humanity that died here. And when I say humanity, not only the murder victims, but German humanity as well. The Jews lost their lives, the murderers had lost any sense of moral conscience. For me, the latter explained the former, rendering an explanation for what was otherwise a scarcely explicable tragedy. The fact that this site was now a public park with only a handful of monuments I found deeply disturbing. Something this horrible deserved more than what was here. This was the American coming out in me. In the United States, Babi Yar would have been a National Historic Site, with signage to offer education and interpretation in an effort to explain what happened. There was nothing of the sort here. Just the ravine, surrounded by woods and silence.

The Menorah Memorial – Babi Yar Park

Ordinary People, Ordinary Places – A Million Lives Later
The killings at Babi Yar did not stop with the 33,771 Jews murdered on September 29^th & 30^th. That was just the start. Over the next two and a half years, Ukrainians, Russians, Roma, more Jews, communists and nationalists were killed here. Estimates of those murdered in and around the ravine are upwards of 100,000. The Syrets concentration camp, located in the immediate area, only added to the horrific death toll. The sheer immensity of the crimes committed were difficult to fathom. I was left asking myself, “All of this and now what”? The peaceful woods, paved trails, muffled sounds of a city in the distance and people enjoying nature. I had no idea what to make of it all. Part of me felt physically sick, another part slowly came to the realization that Babi Yar was a microcosm of the Holocaust. A reflection of the death dealt to millions on ordinary days, in ordinary places, by ordinary people.

The Nightmare That Was Kiev – Cauldron Of Loss: A Trip To Babi Yar (Travels In Eastern Europe #53a)

The main reason I had traveled all the way to Kiev was due to a chance meeting with an Australian at a hostel in Lviv. The Aussie told me of a fascinating daytrip he had recently taken from Kiev to Chernobyl. Tourists were now allowed into the exclusion zone where they could tour sites associated with one of the worst tragedies of the 20^th century. I quizzed him for a good half hour about the logistics involved. Before the conversation was over my mind was made up, I was going to Kiev. Arriving on a Saturday afternoon, I soon learned that the earliest I could get a tour to Chernobyl was on a Tuesday. This gave me a couple of days to sight see in the city. Enough time to visit the scene of another 20^th century tragedy, a ravine that arguably witnessed as much horror as any other specific spot during World War II. And a place that in many ways represents the nightmare upheaval that consumed so much of Kiev from 1917 – 1945.

An ordinary scene for a tragic place – Dorohozhychmetro metro station and the edge of Babi Yar Park (Credit: YarikUkraine)

War On One City – Stalking The Streets
Kiev was not the place to be during the first half of the 20^th century unless a person was looking to get killed. More death and destruction was inflicted upon the city than entire countries experienced within that same time span. The details are frightening in the extreme. Kiev changed hands no less than 19 times during the Russian Revolution and resulting Civil War. The Red/White warfare led to deadly reprisals. The Bolsheviks won the war and right to rule as they pleased. By the early 1930’s, it was not only the Ukrainian countryside that suffered from widespread famine as starvation stalked the streets of Kiev due to forced collectivization. It was also during this time that Kiev suffered through the indignity of losing its capital status in the Ukrainian SSR to the Soviet city of Kharkiv. Things took another turn for the worse even after Kiev won back that status in 1934. Stalin’s purges resulted in a lethal bloodletting of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and anyone who dared whimper a word of nationalist sentiment. Incredibly, the interwar period was only the beginning of much worse violence to come.

For Kiev, the Second World War was a disaster of unimaginable proportions. The Red Army lost more soldiers in the Battle of Kiev than the United States lost in the entire war. The decisive German victory over the Soviet forces resulted in one of the worst defeats inflicted on any single army in world history. At the center of this cauldron of loss was Kiev. The city was subsequently mined by the retreating Soviet forces. Greeting the German occupation forces were upwards of 10,000 explosions, the product of Soviet sabotage efforts. This set the city on fire for nearly a week and left much of it a smoking, hollowed out ruin. In the aftermath of this devastation, an equally grim human toll was exacted first on Kiev’s Jews, then on the population at large. The casualties rose to unheard of levels. In 1939 Kiev’s population was 846,724, four years later that number had been reduced by almost 80%, to just 180,000. Many of those who lost their lives had done so in a ravine that became synonymous with mass murder, Babi Yar.

Handout dated September 28. 1941 ordering all Kievan Jews to assemble for the supposed resettlement

Pinnacle Of Depravity – The Deepest Ravine
Babi Yar sounds more like the name of a Saturday morning cartoon character, than the site of a genocidal massacre. The etymological origins of Babi Yar are quite innocuous, referencing a woman by the name of “Baba” who sold the “yar” (ravine) to a Dominican Monastery. In a darkly ironic twist the site would later be home to Eastern Orthodox and Jewish cemeteries as well as a military camp. Those same purposes would coalesce in the darkness that unfolded in the final days of September 1941. On September 29^th & 30^th of 1941, 33,771 unsuspecting Jews were murdered at the ravine by Nazi death squads. What Auschwitz was to mass murder by gas chamber, Babi Yar was to mass murder by machine gun. The prevailing stereotypical image of the Holocaust continues to be the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is often overlooked that in the lands to the east of Poland – Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and western Russia, hundreds of thousands of Jews were shot by Nazi police units and security services. The pinnacle of this depravity was carried out at Babi Yar.

On a bright and sunny Monday morning amidst the waning warmth of early autumn I went to visit Babi Yar. My route took me from the center of Kiev at Khreshchatyk on the metro to Teatralna where I then transferred to the Green Line. From there I traveled three stations down the line to Dorohozhychi. As I got further from the city center, the crowds dissipated. At Dorohozhychi – in the northwestern part of Kiev – I found myself one of only a few people exiting the metro. Making my way to the surface via a long escalator ride I expected to see signage pointing the way to Babi Yar. There was none that I could find. The situation had been very different for Jews on September 29, 1941. They had been given direction earlier in the week by an order posted by the German occupation authorities. This order would lead them to their deaths.

Crimes concealed – Pathway in Babi Yar Park

The March Of Death – From Incomprehensible To Unimaginable
The order stated that all Jews in Kiev were to gather at the corner of Mel’nikova and Dorohozhytska streets. That street corner was just 2,000 feet from where I exited the Metro station. Standing beneath a brilliant blue sky on a clear autumnal morning I found the idea that one of the largest mass murders of the Holocaust had occurred nearby both incomprehensible and unimaginable. The tens of thousands of Jews that arrived here on that dark day not so long ago had loads of their belongings in tow. Most believed they were headed for resettlement. The Germans were surprised at the number of Jews who obeyed the order. The Jews of Kiev likely did so out of fear. The next to last sentence of the order was a virtual death sentence, stating, “Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot.” Those who had obeyed the order would be ushered to Babi Yar by members of the Nazi police battalions. Never has a death march been so short.