Babi Yar, page 20
They laid in stores for years ahead; the cellars were bursting with vegetables, the attics were piled high with apples and pears, and strings of dried fruits hung under the eaves; nobody forbade anybody to do anything, nobody took anything off anybody and nobody forced anybody to go anywhere… The old folk crossed themselves and said the end of the world must be at hand.
In the evenings they would gather in the light of a taper for a get-together, chewing sunflower seeds till they were drowsy, and distilling spirit from beet. In the daytime you could hear the sound of chains clanking; the old men and women, the girls and the children were busy threshing the wheat. Then they would grind the grain between two big stones and pass the flour through a hand sieve. The village of Litvinovka was simply revelling in its good fortune.
Gapka boiled up an enormous pan of potatoes, tipped them out on the scrubbed wooden table, and the whole family sat around with me among them—leaving me to take as much as I liked, dip the potatoes in the salt, and wash them down with sour milk. I ate and ate, to the point when my head was going round and I was swaying like a drunk, so that by the time it came to the ripe red apples I had lost my appetite.
It was true that men and horses were in great demand in Litvinovka. Vasili and Ivan drove out into the fields the next day to shift potatoes and they didn’t get a break till Sunday. They went ‘half and half’ with Vasili for carting from the fields—for every two sacks he carried he received one. He stored these riches in the Svinchenko’s yard and was busy from morning to night, while I loafed around.
The Svinchenko children took me out into the fields where there were lots of little craters, in almost every one of them the tip of an exploded mine sticking up, a sort of little wing from which you could make an excellent water-wheel.
We clambered around the long, dark farm stables, trying to find hidden hen’s nests, and when we found some eggs we sucked them dry at once. We put on some warm clothes, made some censers out of old tins and filled them with hot coals to keep off the mosquitoes, mounted the horses and took them out to graze at night, while I galloped around on my own lame mount.
There was a broken-down tank standing in the fields, with black and white crosses on its armour-plating, which had been completely stripped inside but still had its seats and vents in order. While the horses were grazing we would play at war: some of us would clamber into the tank while the others attacked it with stones. It made an unbelievable row inside, making our ears ring, and giving us a great deal of pleasure. The tank made a marvellous toy for the village children.
Finally Ivan and Vasili loaded up the cart and we set off back to the city. They wanted to get to the market; I was going home. As my share I was given a sack of potatoes, half a sack of grain and a pile of other gifts. That whole day I strode along the empty highroad, thinking my thoughts, full to the brim with the strangest and most contradictory emotions. Sometimes I wanted to shout, sometimes to cry. I arrived home as a sort of saviour of the family.
THE KIEV-PECHERSK MONASTERY
This time Maruska did not even let us into the house, and my grandmother and I went to Grabarev’s house to sit down and rest before returning home.
‘Oh God,’ said Grandma in a very worried tone. ‘What on earth am I going to tell Olga now? It’s just daylight robbery.’
‘They are in the wrong,’ Grabarev said unemotionally. ‘They will yet have cause to regret what they’ve done.’
‘Olga put all she had into that house, and they have simply grabbed it like thieves.’
‘Don’t worry, everything will come right,’ Grabarev said. ‘Thousands of people are losing their very lives, and here are you fussing about a blessed house.’
Grabarev was planing a plank of wood, making a coffin to order. He had decided that this was the most profitable business for the time being.
‘It will all come right, Martha,’ he repeated. ‘Olga will come back, and Maruska will be thrown out and will have to answer for it.’
‘But the law’s on her side at the moment.’
‘Well, it won’t always be.’
‘Will the Bolsheviks come back?’
Grabarev shrugged his shoulders.
‘If only I knew … ’
‘You know all right,’ Grandma blurted out.
‘I know no more than anybody else. That, at all events, Moscow has not been taken, and that beyond Moscow, Martha, lies the vastness of the Russian land.’
We scarcely paid any attention to a heavy rumbling in the distance. There were so many crashes and explosions all around in those days. We simply heard the sound of an explosion. And we went off home, my grandmother lost in her thoughts until she looked up and said:
‘No, there’s some reason for him staying behind—he’s been made to do it because he’s a Communist, and he’s made up that story about the misfortune with his family so that it-should seem all right. But he’s a good man. May the Lord preserve him.’
We came to our favourite spot, and there was the monastery spread out before us. It was ablaze.
All the openings in the monastery’s main bell-tower were lit up with a bright orange light, as if it were being illuminated, but there was very little smoke. The Cathedral of the Dormition had already gone: it was just a heap of rubble with what was left of the walls and their frescoes sticking up out of it. All the museums and the whole township enclosed by the monastery walls were burning.
Grandma sat down there where she was. We could see people running out of the monastery and they were all saying that the Cathedral of the Dormition had been blown up. It had been a storehouse of ancient manuscripts and books. The burning pages were swept up by the wind and came raining down, setting everything alight. The Germans were doing everything they could to put the fires out, but there was no water. As for who had caused the explosions, who had found such an act necessary, nobody knew. The same people, no doubt, as had blown up the Kreshchatik. It was quite clear now that it was not the Jews who had destroyed the Kreshchatik.
That was on November 3rd, 1941. I watched the monastery burning.
My grandmother was very deeply affected by it all; she sat on there for a long time, crossing herself from time to time, and I had difficulty in persuading her to return home. It was as though something had snapped inside her; something had broken that was never mended to her dying day.
Only when she reached home did she start fussing round the stove in her usual way, and, as she ladled out the soup, she said:
‘How could God let it happen? They destroyed the Desyatinnaya church, and St Michael’s Monastery, and they made a factory out of our Peter and Paul, where I had you baptized. And now they’ve wrecked the monastery itself… And you, my child, will see more in your short time than many another sees in a whole lifetime. May the Lord take care of you, you poor little thing, in this great world.’
[If you ever happen to visit the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery, try asking the guides whether it is true that it was blown up by N.K.V.D. agents, of whom the principal one was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union—and just watch the expression on their faces as you ask it.]
[Russia was converted to Christianity in the year A.D. 988. It was the Prince of Kiev, Vladimir the Baptist, who built the magnificent Desyatinnaya church and Prince Yaroslav the Wise who built the Cathedral of St Sophia. The Monastery of St Michael was founded in the city, while just to the south of it, on the steep slopes above the Dnieper, was built the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery and its lovely Cathedral of the Dormition.
It was in this monastery that the monk Nestor started his chronicle The Tale of Bygone Years, which laid the foundations for the writing of our history, and it was from there that literacy and the arts spread.
That was before Moscow existed. In the middle of the twelfth century a Kievan prince, Yury Dolgoruki, founded the little settlement of Moscow in the course of one of his campaigns, and he is buried there at the centre of our culture of those days—in the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery.
Until 1917 the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery was a magnificent city, a sort of Vatican or Jerusalem of the Orthodox Church, where the Tsars went to pay their respects and millions of pilgrims gathered every year. The libraries of the monastery contained priceless volumes, a printing press produced books, the walls of the churches were decorated with unique frescoes and mosaics, and ancient treasures were stored in its vaults.
After 1917, to the slogans of ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ and ‘Destroy the old and build anew’, the first building to be destroyed and flattened to its foundations was the Desyatinnaya church. All that can be seen of it today are a few bricks preserved in the Kiev historical museum.
Dozens of other churches of less historical significance were pulled down, while others were turned into storehouses, clubs and workshops. In 1934 the Cathedral of St Michael was demolished, and historians were able to save only a few small twelfth-century mosaics, which can also be seen in the museums today.
The monastery was too big to be pulled down. So they treated it differently: they turned it into a group of anti-religious museums, putting all the principal museums of Kiev inside its walls.
During the defence of Kiev the museums were closed and the monastery remained deserted. They managed to evacuate some of the museum exhibits eastwards.
And six weeks after the entry of the Germans the monastery was mysteriously blown up and burnt to ashes, with the Germans trying desperately to put out the fires.
Shortly after that Molotov appealed to the whole world and accused the Germans of destroying historical and cultural treasures.
Soviet experts drew up a ‘Report of the Special State Commission of Research into Crimes Committed by German-Fascist Invaders’, which says, at one point:
‘On the order of the German Command military units looted, blew up and destroyed that most ancient cultural monument, the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery.’*
The same statement appears in guide-books and books of historical research.] The most widespread explanation is given in a book by K. Dubina, Director of the Institute of History of the Ukrainian Republic:
It was established that the Fascist vandals had laid mines beneath the Dormition Cathedral and other buildings some time previously and waited for a convenient moment to detonate them. On November 3rd, 1941, the monastery was visited by the Slovak traitor Tiso. This served as a suitable moment to carry out the act of provocation. As soon as Tiso had left the territory of the Monastery the explosions took place. As we have already said, the Germans tried to attribute these crimes to Soviet patriots who were supposed to have prepared an attempt on Tiso’s life. But even such a hardened war-criminal as Scheer was forced to admit that it was the work of the German Fascists themselves.*
[Such is the official version, confirmed by the sworn evidence of a hardened war-criminal. But it is sufficient to glance through the newspapers published at the time to see that the Germans made no propaganda capital out of the destruction of the monastery. It is true that they blew up and burnt down a great deal, but that was when they were retreating in 1943. In 1941 it was only the Russians who were blowing things up as they retreated.
These are general reflections on the subject. The true facts and documents, if indeed they exist at all, are unlikely ever to be published.
But there are still witnesses living—people who had been living in the few dwelling houses on the territory of the monastery. Here is what they remember; here is what actually happened.
As the former centre of the Orthodox faith, the monastery itself was a thorn ‘in the side of the Soviet government. They had succeeded in driving the monks out of it, in taking savage reprisals on them, in stripping the monastery of its riches in the name of nationalization, and in turning it into an anti-religious museum. But when war broke out and the Germans entered Kiev the surviving monks started preparing to revive the monastery, and the word began to go round that ‘Once the Germans are here the monastery will arise again in all its glory.’
The day before the Soviet forces abandoned Kiev, according to the people living there, the deserted monastery was cordoned off by N.K.V.D. troops. Nobody was allowed to enter it. Lorries were seen entering and leaving. Then the cordon was removed.
On September 19th, 1941, the Germans entered Kiev, went straight to the monastery and started ringing out long, excited peals of triumph on the bells.
They then proceeded to open up all the buildings, museums and cells and to take away the carpets, silver vessels and articles of worship. But the German command immediately stepped in and the local people saw the frightened soldiers being forced to take their booty back.
The monastery stands on the highest point in Kiev and is surrounded by high walls, so that it is an excellent fortress to defend. The Germans had gun emplacements there, including anti-aircraft guns to protect the Dnieper crossing, and soldiers were billeted in the numerous cells.
Six weeks passed. The Kreshchatik had already been blown up and destroyed by fire and the last Jews were being executed in Babi Yar. Then suddenly there was a powerful explosion in the monastery. A section of the defensive walls collapsed right on to the guns, though apparently none of the gun-crews suffered. It was obviously an act of sabotage.
The Germans had hardly had time to realize what had happened when there was another explosion, this time in the huge building, shaped like a bunker, that stood at the monastery’s main gates. In recent years it had served as a munition store for Soviet troops, and it seemed as if the munitions had been left there since they could be seen exploding in the fire. The building began to burn so furiously and such fountains of sparks and embers went up from it that fires were started throughout the monastery.
The Germans hastily ran their weapons out of the monastery and rushed around trying to extinguish the fires that broke out all over the place, but there was no water. Then suddenly they dropped what they were doing and scattered in all directions, shouting: ‘Mines!’ They organized a team of people to run round the houses urging the people to leave them. ‘Get out, quick! The Soviets have mined the monastery!’ Later, it is true, it was established that there were no mines underneath the dwelling houses, but at the time the people living there fled for their lives just as they had done on the Kreshchatik. It appeared that the Kreshchatik affair was being repeated.
What happened in fact was a third resounding explosion, which caused the very earth to tremble. It went off inside the Dormition Cathedral. But the cathedral survived the first explosion. It had been built in the eleventh century from a special kind of flat, red clay brick, which was so tough you couldn’t break it with a hammer. The layers of mortar were thicker than the bricks themselves, and in Kievan Russia they knew how to make that mortar even stronger. That brickwork had been meant to last for thousands of years.
After a short interval (exactly as had happened with the German headquarters on the Kreshchatik) there was another explosion in the cathedral of such a force that those flat red bricks went flying half a mile away and landed all over Pechersk, and the cathedral itself collapsed into a heap of rubble. According to what one old man recalls: ‘When that happened the first three explosions seemed to have been just child’s play; the fourth one was really frightful!’ I wonder how many lorry-loads of explosive it took?
The whole territory of the monastery was then covered with pieces of mosaic, frescoes, altar screens, burning pages of ancient manuscripts and volumes with heavy brass bindings ripped and torn to pieces.
And everything was ablaze—the Refectory church, the baroque Archbishop’s House, the ancient printing house, all the museums, the libraries and archives and the bell-tower.
After waiting a little to make sure that the explosions had finished, the Germans again rushed in to try and put the fires out. By some miracle they succeeded, by shifting the burning beams in the roof, in putting out the fire in the bell-tower, because it was made of stone with high openings. The top tier which carries the bells, escaped. But that was all they managed to save.]
* Kiev - Gorod-Geroi (Kiev - Heroic City), a collection of material on the achievements of the people of Kiev in the Great Fatherland War (Kiev, 1961), p. 369.
* K. Dubina, Gody Tyazholykh Ispytanii (Years of Endurance) (Kiev, 1962), pp. 96–7.
NIGHT
They herded the sailors into Babi Yar one very cold day, when there were even a few snowflakes in the air. According to rumours, they were sailors from the Dnieper river fleet.
They had their hands tied together with wire, but not all of them, because some of them could shake their fists in the air. They marched along in silence (maybe they were shot if they shouted), but from time to time a clenched fist appeared above the crowd, as one of them drew himself up and pretended to stretch his shoulders.
Many of them were barefoot, some of them were stripped to the waist, and a few were just in their underpants. It was frightful to see the way the ones in front marched—in a row close together, looking straight ahead, marching stiffly as though they were made of stone.
They went on shouting and protesting even when they were in Babi Yar itself, when they could no longer doubt that they were going to be executed. They shouted: ‘Long live Stalin!’, ‘Long live the Red Army!’ and ‘Long live Communism!’ [They believed they were dying for the good of mankind, and the Germans cut them down with machine-gun fire in the same cause.]
A strange report, lacking the usual screaming headlines and exaggerated boasting, appeared in the newspaper which I sold on November 23rd:
FURTHER SUCCESSES IN BEND OF DONETS AND ON CENTRAL SECTOR OF EASTERN FRONT ENEMY FAILS IN ATTEMPT AT BREAKTHROUGH BEFORE LENINGRAD.
