Babi Yar, page 11
The old people couldn’t carry a great deal and they had no valuables, so they simply took with them the bare necessities of life and something to eat. Dina put the rucksack on her back and just after eight they set off.
There were plenty of people on Turgenyev Street, and Artem Street was completely jammed. People with bundles, with prams, all sorts of trolleys and carts and occasionally even lorries—all standing there, then moving forward a little, then standing still again.
The noise of raised voices and the crowds made it seem like a demonstration, when the streets are similarly jammed with people; but there were no flags, no banners and no cheers.
How odd it was to see the lorries; where on earth had they got them? In some cases people from a whole block of flats had got together and hired transport for their possessions, and the people themselves would keep clustered around their cart or lorry. Among the bundles and piles of cases old people were lying and children were sitting in groups. In some places people were pushing two or three infants in one pram.
There were a great many people seeing others off: neighbours, friends, relations, Russians and Ukrainians, helping to carry the bags, giving a hand to the invalids, even carrying them on their backs.
This whole procession moved very slowly, and Artem Street is very long. In some of the gateways German soldiers were standing and studying the people, especially the girls, as they went by. Apparently Dina took their fancy, because they beckoned her into the courtyard, indicating that the floors needed cleaning:
‘Komm waschen!’
She dismissed them with a gesture. It went on and on and on, till the people were quite dazed by it all; that noisy procession, that ‘demonstration’, with all the pushing and shoving, the unbroken sound of people talking and children crying. Dina was wearing a fur coat and it was getting too hot for her.
It was not until after midday that they reached the cemetery. She remembers seeing on the right the long brick wall of the Jewish graveyard, and the gateway into it.
At that point there was a barbed-wire barrier across the street and anti-tank obstacles, with a passage left between them, and there were rows of Germans wearing badges on their chests, as well as Ukrainian police in black uniforms with grey cuffs.
At the entrance a very striking figure, a tall, energetic man in a Ukrainian embroidered shirt, with a long Cossack moustache, was giving instructions. The crowd swept through the gap past him, but nobody was coming out again, except cabbies who from time to time would drive back with empty cabs. They had got rid of their loads somewhere and were now making their way through against the crowd, shouting and waving their whips, and causing even more pushing and swearing.
It was very difficult to grasp what was going on. Dina sat the old folk down near the gateway to the cemetery and went to see for herself what was happening up in front.
Like many others, up to this point she had thought there was a train standing there. Some shooting could be heard not far away, a plane was circling low overhead, and there was a general feeling of alarm and panic in the air.
Dina overheard snatches of conversation in the crowd:
‘It’s because of the war, the war! They’re moving us away from it, somewhere quieter.’
‘And why are they only taking Jews?’
Some elderly woman suggested in a tone of great authority:
‘Well, it’s because they are related to the Germans as a people, and they have to be got away first.’
Dina had difficulty in pushing her way through the crowd and was getting more and more concerned, when she saw that out in front they were putting all the people’s possessions to one side. All the baggage—the bundles and cases—was being put into a pile on the left, and all the food-stuff on the right.
But the Germans were moving the people a few at a time: they would send off one group, wait, and after an interval let some more through, counting them as they went, and then … stop, in the same way as queues of people were let into the shops in batches of ten to buy material.
There was more talk among all the noise and racket:
‘Ah, our things will come along in the luggage van; we shall sort them out when we get there.’
‘How are we ever going to sort out a pile of things like that? They’ll simply divide them up equally between all of us. Then there won’t be rich and poor any more.’
Dina was now really scared. It was nothing like a railway station. She wasn’t yet sure what it was, but she sensed with her whole being that these people were not being sent away. Whatever was happening, they weren’t being sent anywhere.
The oddest thing about it was the occasional sound of machine-gun fire near by. She couldn’t admit to herself that it was the sound of people being shot. For one thing, there was such an enormous mass of people! Such things didn’t happen. And then again—what was the point?
It can be said with certainty that the majority of people felt just as Dina did, that something was wrong; but they clung on to the idea that ‘We are being deported,’ perhaps for the following reasons:
[When the order was first published nine Jews out of every ten had never heard a word about any Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Right up to the outbreak of war Soviet newspapers had been doing nothing but praising and glorifying Hitler as the Soviet Union’s best friend, and had said nothing about the position of the Jews in Germany and Poland. It was possible even to find among the Jews of Kiev some enthusiastic admirers of Hitler as an able statesman.]
[Again,] the older men used to tell stories about the Germans in the Ukraine in 1918; how they hadn’t touched the Jews then, but on the contrary had treated them very decently, because their language was very similar and so forth …
The old men used to say:
‘There are all sorts of Germans, but on the whole they are cultured, decent people; not your barbaric Russia, but Europe, with a European respect for order.’
There was something else, which had happened quite recently. Two days previously some people on Vorovsky Street had seized a flat belonging to a Jewish family. Some relatives who had stayed behind in the same building went along to the headquarters of the nearest German unit and complained. An officer came down straight away and ordered them out of the flat at once, saying to the Jews with a bow: ‘There you are, everything is in order now.’ That was literally only a couple of days before; everybody had seen it happen and stories about it quickly went around. And, after all, the Germans were consistent and logical people; whatever else they might be, they had certainly always been known for their consistency.
But, if it wasn’t deportation, what on earth was going on?
Dina says that at that moment she felt only a sort of animal terror and her eyes seemed to cloud over—a state such as she had never known before.
They were taking people’s warm clothes off them. A soldier came up to Dina and, in a trice and without a word, he deftly removed her coat.
At that point she rushed back. She sought out her old folk at the gate and told them what she had seen.
Her father said:
‘Listen, daughter, we don’t need you any more. Go away.’
She went across to the barrier, where quite a lot of people were trying to get back out, while the crowd was still streaming down in the other direction. The man with the moustaches and the embroidered shirt was still shouting and giving orders. Everyone called him ‘Mr Shevchenko’, like the Ukrainian poet. Maybe that was his proper name, or maybe somebody had dubbed him that because of his moustache, but it sounded rather frightful, like ‘Mr Pushkin’ or ‘Mr Dostoyevsky’. Dina managed to push her way through to him and began to explain that she had been seeing people off, that her children were left behind in the city, and that she begged to be let out.
He demanded her identity card. She handed it to him.
He took one look at the entry after ‘Nationality’ and exclaimed:
‘Hey—bloody Jewess! Get back!’
At that point Dina at last understood everything: they were being executed.
She started convulsively tearing her identity card up into little pieces and scattered them to left and right. Then she went back to the old people, but told them nothing, so as not to upset them before it was necessary.
Although she was already without her coat, she began to feel stifled. All around her were lots of people, tightly packed together, their breath visible in the cold air. Lost children were howling, while some folk were sitting on their bundles, eating. ‘How on earth can they eat now? Do they still not realize what’s happening?’
Then the people in charge started giving orders and shouting, making those who were sitting down stand up and moving them on, pushing the ones in the rear forward, so that some sort of straggling queue was formed. Some of the people’s belongings were put down in one place, others in another; there was much pushing and shoving. In the confusion Dina lost track of her parents; she looked around in time to see them being sent off in another group farther on, while Dina’s queue came to a halt.
They stood there waiting. She was straining to see where her mother and father had been taken, when an enormous German came up to her and said:
‘Come and sleep with me and I’ll let you out.’
She looked at him as if he were off his head and he went away. At last they started letting her group through.
The talking stopped; everyone fell silent, as though they had been struck dumb, and they marched on for some time in silence, between rows of Germans. Up in front could be seen rows of soldiers with dogs on leads. From behind Dina heard:
‘My dear, please give me a hand; I’m blind.’
She put her arm round the old man and went along with him.
‘Where do you think they’re taking us?’ she asked him.
‘We are going, my child,’ he said, ‘to pay our last debt to God.’
At that moment they entered a long corridor formed by two rows of soldiers and dogs. It was very narrow—some four or five feet across. The soldiers were lined up shoulder to shoulder, with their sleeves rolled up, each of them brandishing a rubber club or a big stick.
Blows rained down on the people as they passed through.
There was no question of being able to dodge or get away. Brutal blows, immediately drawing blood, descended on their heads, backs and shoulders from left and right. The soldiers kept shouting: ‘Schnell, schnell!’ laughing happily, as if they were watching a circus act; they even found ways of delivering harder blows in the more vulnerable places, the ribs, the stomach and the groin.
Everybody started shouting and the women began to scream. It was like a scene in a film; for one brief moment Dina caught sight of a young man she knew from her street, an intelligent, well-dressed lad, sobbing his eyes out.
She saw people falling to the ground. The dogs were immediately set on them. One man managed to pick himself up with a shout, but others remained on the ground while people pressed forward from behind and the crowd carried on, walking on the bodies and trampling them into the ground.
Everything seemed to go black in Dina’s head at the sight of all this. She straightened herself up, carried her head high and marched on, stiff as a board, unbending. It seems she must already have been badly hurt, but she felt and understood little of what was happening; she simply kept saying to herself: ‘Don’t fall, you mustn’t fall.’
The poor people, now quite out of their minds, tumbled out into a space cordoned off by troops, a sort of square overgrown with grass. The whole of this grass plot was scattered with articles of underwear, footwear and other clothes.
The Ukrainian police—to judge by their accent they were not local people but from the Western Ukraine—were grabbing hold of people roughly, hitting them and shouting:
‘Get your clothes off! Quickly! Schnell!’
Those who hesitated had their clothes ripped off them by force, and were kicked and struck with knuckledusters or clubs by the Germans, who seemed to be drunk with fury in a sort of sadistic rage.
All this was obviously being done so that the great mass of people should not come to their senses. There were many naked people covered in blood.
From the direction of a group of naked people who were being led off somewhere Dina heard her mother calling to her and waving her hand:
‘Daughter, you don’t look like one! Try and get away!’
They were herded off. Dina marched determinedly up to a policeman and asked him where the commander was. She told him she had been seeing someone off and had got mixed up with the crowd by chance.
He asked for her papers. She started fumbling in her bag, but he snatched it from her and looked through everything himself. There was money, a labour book, and a trade-union card, which do not show the nationality of the holder. The surname ‘Pronicheva’ convinced the policeman. He did not return her bag, but pointed to a hillock on which a handful of people were sitting.
‘Sit there. We’ll shoot the Jews first and then let you out.’
Dina went across to the hillock and sat down. Everybody there was silent, crazed with fright. She was afraid to look up: somebody might recognize her, quite by chance, and cry out: ‘She’s a dirty Jewess!’ These people would stop at nothing to save their own skins. For that reason she tried not to look at anybody, and nobody looked at her. Only an old woman sitting next to her in a fluffy knitted scarf complained quietly to Dina that she had been seeing her daughter-in-law off and had got caught … But she herself was a Ukrainian, she was no Jewess, and who ever thought it would come to this?
They had all been seeing people off.
So there they sat, and in front of them, as if on a stage, a nightmarish scene was enacted: one group of people after another came staggering out of the corridor, screaming, battered, each of them to be seized by a policeman, beaten again and stripped of clothes; this was repeated over and over again.
Dina declares that some of them were laughing hysterically, and that she saw with her own eyes how several people went grey on the spot in the time it took for them to be stripped and sent to be shot.
They made the naked people form up into short lines and led them through the gap which had been hurriedly dug in the steep wall of sand. What was beyond it could not be seen, but there was the sound of shooting, and the only people who returned from the other side were Germans and policemen, to fetch more people.
The mothers in particular kept fussing over their children, with the result that from time to time some German or policeman would lose his temper, snatch a child away from its mother, go across to the sandstone wall, swing back and fling the child over the wall like a piece of wood.
Dina sat on there for a long time, feeling as though she was imprisoned in hoops of iron, her head sunk between her shoulders, and afraid to glance at her neighbours because new people kept joining them. She was no longer capable of hearing either the shouts or the shooting.
It started to get dark.
Suddenly an open car drew up and in it was a tall, well-built, smartly turned-out officer with a riding crop in his hand. He seemed to be in charge. He had a Russian interpreter at his side.
‘Who are these?’ the officer asked the policemen through the interpreter, pointing to the hillock, where there were about fifty people sitting by this time.
‘They are our people, Ukrainians,’ the policeman replied. ‘They didn’t know; they ought to be let out.’
The officer started shouting:
‘Shoot the lot at once! If even one of them gets out of here and starts talking in the city, not a single Jew will turn up tomorrow.’
The interpreter translated this word for word to the police man, while the people sat on the hillside and listened.
‘Come on then! Let’s go! Get yourselves up!’ the policeman shouted.
The people stood up as if they were drunk. Maybe because it was already late the Germans didn’t bother to undress this group, but led them through the gap in their clothes.
Dina was in about the second group. They went through the gap and came out into a sand quarry with sides practically overhanging. It was already half-dark, and Dina could not see the quarry properly. One after the other they were hurried along to the left, along a very narrow ledge.
On their left was the side of the quarry, to the right a deep drop; the ledge had apparently been specially cut out for the purposes of the execution, and it was so narrow that as they went along it people instinctively leaned towards the wall of sandstone, so as not to fall in.
Dina looked down and her head swam, she seemed to be so high up. Beneath her was a sea of bodies covered in blood. On the other side of the quarry she could just distinguish the machine-guns which had been set up there and a few German soldiers. They had lit a bonfire and it looked as though they were making coffee on it.
When the whole line of people had been driven on to the ledge one of the Germans left the bonfire, took a machine-gun and started shooting.
Dina did not see so much as feel the bodies falling from the ledge and the stream of bullets coming closer to her. The idea flashed into her mind: ‘Now … now I …’ And without more ado she jumped, holding her fists tight as she went down.
It seemed to her that she fell for ages—it was probably a very deep drop. When she struck the bottom she felt neither the blow nor any pain, but she was immediately spattered with warm blood, and blood was streaming down her face, just as if she had fallen into a bath full of blood. She lay still, her arms stretched out, her eyes closed.
All around and beneath her she could hear strange submerged sounds, groaning, choking and sobbing: many of the people were not dead yet. The whole mass of bodies kept moving slightly as they settled down and were pressed tighter by the movements of the ones who were still living.
Some soldiers came out on to the ledge and flashed their torches down on the bodies, firing bullets from their revolvers into any which appeared to be still living. But someone not far from Dina went on groaning as loud as before.
Then she heard people walking near her, actually on the bodies. They were Germans who had climbed down and were bending over and taking things from the dead and occasionally firing at those which showed signs of life.
