Babi Yar, page 22
Ay-li, ay-la, ay-la,
Ay-li, ay-la-ay-la,
Ho-ho, ho-ho, ha-ha-ha … ’
It was already getting dark and I had still not done the most important thing I had to do, so I slid down from the boxes and rushed down the stairs. Gramp was snoring on his trestle bed. I slipped into the kitchen. That was what I was after!
The smell of freshly made soup still hung around the kitchen, but the stove was already quite cold. There were clusters of enormous, dry, clean saucepans on it. The frying-pans had also been cleaned. I poked around on the tables and underneath them and examined every corner, but there was nothing, not a crumb, not even a slop bucket. I had never in my life seen a kitchen so bare and so utterly clean. Yet there was still the fresh smell of cooking to torment me.
In an effort to find at least a grain of corn I started crawling around examining the cracks in the floor. But everything had been brushed up. I could scarcely believe it was true, and started my search all over again. In one of the saucepans something had been burnt, had stuck to the sides and had not been scrubbed off. I scratched it off and chewed on it, and still had no idea what it was. One of the frying-pans seemed to me not to have been properly cleaned. I sniffed at it and found it smelt of fried onions. The beastly cut-throats and vipers had even been putting fried onions into their own soup! It made me whimper, I longed so much for some soup flavoured with onion, and I started licking the frying-pan, either imagining or actually getting the faint taste of onion. I went on whimpering and licking, whimpering and licking.
ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
The Ukrainskoye Slovo newspaper was closed down in December. The slogan ‘Published in the Ukraine in Ukrainian’, which it had boldly displayed day after day, was regarded as harmful. They also closed down the literary almanack The Drum. This was the explanation:
A note to our readers.
As from today the Ukrainian-language newspaper will appear in a new form and will be called the Novoye Ukrainskoye Slovo. Extreme nationalists working with elements close to the Bolsheviks tried to turn the national Ukrainian newspaper into a news-sheet for their own treacherous purposes. No attention was paid to the many warnings given by the German civilian authorities that the paper must be neutral and serve only the interests of the Ukrainian people. An attempt was made to undermine the trust existing between our German liberators and the Ukrainian people.
The editorial board has been purged of traitorous elements.*
How well we understood the sense of that last line!
[The editor of Ukrainskoye Slovo, Ivan Rogach, and the brilliant poetess Olena Teliga, who had been President of the Writers’ Union and editor of The Drum, as well as many contributors to both publications, were executed in Babi Yar. At the same time large-scale arrests and executions of Ukrainian nationalists started to take place throughout the Ukraine.]
The new paper soon got down to business, it published an extremely violent article entitled ‘Scum’, in which it lashed out at the idlers—the scum—who didn’t want to find jobs for themselves: nobody knew what they lived on; they made money in various doubtful ways and were a disgrace to society. They had to be sought out and punished with all severity.
Another article was headed ‘The Whisperers’, and was about people who went around telling malicious jokes. Such nasty, crude jokes and sinister rumours were being put about by traitors and enemies of the people, they said, that firm measures would have to be taken to deal with such rumour-mongers and punish them severely.
[’Goodness gracious, you’re not pulling my leg every now and again, are you?’ my grandfather said in a frightened tone. ‘Are you sure that’s not a Bolshevik paper you’re reading sometimes?’
‘No, Gramp, it’s German! Look—there’s the Fascist sign.’]
Every day the newspaper’s tone became more nervous, and it was full of shouts and threats. Half the announcements were now only in German. And the bulletins from the Führer’s headquarters became much drier and briefer, but more alarming: ‘Powerful Attacks Repulsed in Bend of Donets’; ‘Soviet Attacks Repulsed on Eastern Front’.
My mother said that in newspapers you had always to read, not the words themselves, but between the lines.
That is what I learnt to do.
My grandfather saw the body of a man who had been hanged on Vladimir Hill. It hung there with the snow settling on it, with nothing on the feet, the head crooked to one side and the face quite black: either he had been severely beaten or his face had turned black after he was hanged. There was a placard on him saying he had attacked a German.
A mine exploded in the German headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Street. They grabbed everybody for that—not only young and middle-aged men but the old folk as well, and even women with babies, and it was said that more than a thousand people went to Babi Yar for that one mine. The City Commandant Eberhard no longer issued any proclamations.
By now we were afraid to go out on the streets—you never knew where the next explosion was going to be and whether you’d be taken off and shot for it … ‘You get yourself into such places,’ my mother exclaimed, ‘you are so late coming home; they’ll take a pot-shot at you one day, like shooting a rabbit; don’t you dare go out any more!’
It was terribly difficult trying to observe the curfew imposed by the Germans. There was no radio, and our clock went only when the spirit moved it, so that before going out my grandmother would go next door to find out the time, then look over the fence to see whether anyone was passing whom she could ask.
There were plenty of rumours going round: that they had shot some saboteurs in Babi Yar; that they were executing Ukrainian nationalists; that they were shooting people who infringed the black-out; shooting layabouts; shooting rumour-mongers; shooting partisans; shooting, shooting, shooting … The machine-gun chattered away in the ravine every day.
‘What on earth is happening?’ my mother asked as she listened to the sound of the shooting. ‘What is the world coming to?’
‘The Enemy is at hand. Be silent!’ said Grandma.
‘They keep killing off their “enemies of the people”, so that in the end there won’t be any people left. Then they will have achieved their ideal—there’ll be no people and no enemies, just peace and quiet.’
‘It’s true, Marusya, what it says in the Bible—that the Enemy shall consume himself.’
‘They’re shooting again, can’t you hear it? —they’re executing people … Will people never come to their senses?’
‘Marusya, my dear, we’ll all be dead long before that happens!’
* Novoye Ukrainskoye Slovo, December 14th, 1941.
WOUNDED ON THE STAIRS
I knew they’d be waiting for me and I was frightened long before I reached them. I took some crusts of bread out of my box, broke up a couple of boiled potatoes, wrapped them up and put them into the basket my grandmother had got ready.
It was fabulously valuable, that basket. There was a pot of fruit jelly in it, a little flask of milk, and even a tumbler full of fresh butter. I had forgotten what such food tasted like; it was like precious stones—beautiful to look at, but not to be eaten.
Near the market I jumped on the back of an empty lorry and squatted down against the cabin in the hope that the driver would not look out of his back window. He didn’t, and he drove so fast that I bumped about like a wooden doll, but he turned off near the tram terminus and I had to jump down. I had done so much jumping on and off those lorries I was like a cat. Most important was to catch them as they went round a corner, and if you had to jump off when they were going full speed the thing was to push yourself away from it with all your might so as to reduce your own speed. I learnt to do this perfectly after having landed once smack on my face in the roadway.
At the tram terminus I got on to a goods car and tucked myself away in the corner of the platform. The conductor came around collecting money, but I turned away as though I hadn’t seen him. I hadn’t any money to give him, in any case.
I hopped off in Podol and walked down Andrew’s Hill, which was lined with beggars all the way. Some of them were whining and begging openly for money, others exposed their amputated limbs in silence. There were other, quiet, intelligent-looking elderly men and women, some with spectacles and pince-nez, standing there; they were professors and teachers of various kinds, like our maths teacher who had died. In the case of some of them who sat there you couldn’t tell whether they were alive or dead. There had always been plenty of beggars about even before the war, but now there were so many it was simply frightful. They wandered all over the place, knocking on people’s doors, some of them people who had lost their homes through fire, some with babies, some of them on the run, and some swollen with hunger.
It was bitterly cold and the people walked down the streets with grim expressions on their faces, hunching themselves up from the wind, worried, in ragged clothes, in all sorts of strange footwear and threadbare coats. It was indeed a city of beggars.
St Andrew’s church stood on the very top of the steep hill, dominating the whole of Podol. It was built by Rastrelli;* blue and white, delicate, reaching to the skies. It was also besieged by beggars and there was a service going on inside. I straightway forced my way through and stood there listening and studying the paintings of famous masters on the walls. The inside of the church was richly decorated, with lots of gilding, and next to it, in unlovely contrast, was that ragged, starving, whining crowd of devout women beating their brows against the icy stone floor.
I couldn’t bear it for long, and climbed up into the tower. From there I had a bird’s-eye view of the Dnieper, Trukhanov Island and a long stretch of the left bank, including Darnitsa. Below me was a sea of roofs. To the left was just bare ground, where the Desyatinnaya church used to stand. That was where the legendary founders of Kievan Rus were buried and I wondered whether, if the foundations had been preserved, perhaps the bones of Princess Olga or Prince Vladimir had also by some miracle been preserved, and were still lying there and nobody knew about them. I so wanted to think about all these things. The church tower was a place where I always wanted to rest my elbows on the parapet and think.
A German officer who had clambered up through the snow to the top of the hill was taking photographs of the church from a rather odd angle below it and I, knowing a little about photography, watched how carefully he chose his spot. I was the only human figure to include in his picture and give it a little life.
Instead of moving away I stared straight at him and thought: So you click your shutter, then you’ll develop the film and make some prints and send them home to your family, so that they can see what your war has brought you. You photograph it as though it were your own property: you acquired the right to do so by shooting. But what have you to do with St Andrew’s church, or with Kiev itself? The fact that you came here shooting and murdering? Like a highway-robber? [What is this banditry going on all over the world? First one gang appeared, with their red banners and their fine slogans, murdering, robbing and destroying. Now another has arrived, also with red banners and fine slogans, also murdering, robbing and destroying. You are all bandits.] Some people build and work and labour in the sweat of their brows, then the looters come along, who have never created anything since the day they were born but who know how to shoot. And they grab everything for themselves. It is you, and only you, the ones who do the shooting, who are the real, genuine enemies, [whatever banners you choose to posture under.] HENCEFORWARD AND TO THE END OF MY DAYS I SHALL HATE YOU AND YOUR MISERABLE WEAPONS, MAYBE I SHALL DIE FROM HUNGER IN ONE OF YOUR PRISONS OR FROM ONE OF YOUR BULLETS, BUT I SHALL DIE FULL OF CONTEMPT FOR YOU AS THE MOST LOATHSOME THINGS ON THIS EARTH.
I left the church, breathing heavily from impotent rage, and came to myself only when I reached Bogdan Khmelnitsky Square, across which a strange column of skiers were making their way. They had no idea at all of how to get along on skis: they put their feet down awkwardly, slithered about and got their skis all mixed up. The square was full of the noise they made, and the soldiers looked rather pathetic, expressions of pain and annoyance on their faces. They had obviously been forced to try to master that rather difficult skill so that snow should no longer be an obstacle to their evil progress across the world. The officer was shouting at them and getting very cross. They shuffled along slowly in the direction of Vladimir Hill, and I very much wanted to go and watch them breaking their necks on it, but I was already late.
In the middle of the city, the trams were running. People were standing in the wind at the tram stop, among them a very undersized German in a light greatcoat and boots that were too small for him, wearing a soldier’s cap and woollen ear-muffs. He was badly chilled and quite blue in the face. His hands were shaking and he couldn’t keep them in his pockets as he kept fidgeting and jerking about, banging one foot against the other, wiping his face with his hands; then all of a sudden he started to dance about, kicking his feet out like a wooden clown, and he seemed to be on the verge of letting out a piercing howl, no longer able to bear the biting cold.
The fact that he looked rather silly could not have entered his head, because there were only local people standing around and for Germans that was as if the place was deserted. They moved about among us as though they were on their own, quite ready to let their trousers down, blow their noses with their fingers, or urinate openly on the street.
Two lorries drove out of the gateway of St Sophia’s cathedral, carrying something covered over with tarpaulin: once again they were carting off some loot. It was very odd: every tenth word they used was the word ‘culture’—‘the centuries-old German culture’, ‘the cultural revival of the world’, ‘the whole culture of mankind depends on the successes of German arms’ … It sounded fine; it was amazing what you can do with words.
This culture of theirs consisted, in effect, in their clearing every single thing out of the museums, using the manuscripts from the Ukrainian Academy for wrapping paper, taking potshots with their revolvers at statues, mirrors and gravestones—indeed at anything that offered itself as a target. That, it appeared, was the revival of culture.
And then there was the humanism. German humanism was the greatest in the world; the German Army was the most humane army, and everything it did was only to further German humanism. No, not just humanism, but GERMAN humanism, the most noble, intelligent and purposeful of all possible humanisms.
Because, it appears, there are as many humanisms in the world as there are murderers. Every murderer has his own, private and most noble brand of humanism, of course, just as he has private ways of reviving culture.
[We had had SOCIALIST culture—‘we shall destroy the old and build the new’ – and in its name they flattened the Desyatinnaya church to the ground, laid lorry-loads of explosives beneath the Cathedral of the Dormition, sent scholars off to Siberia and poisoned Gorky. There was also SOCIALIST humanism, in whose name the secret police went prowling around in their cars at night, murdered people, threw them into the ravine from the windows of the October Palace, and covered Siberia with whole settlements of concentration camps.
[That, it now appeared, had been wrong. GERMAN humanism was now put forward once again] as the opposite of that universal, diffuse, ineffective and therefore hostile humanism, for which there could be only one place—Babi Yar.
[Soviet humanism, German humanism, Assyrian humanism, Martian humanism—there were so many of them in the world, and the primary aim of each one of them was to kill off as many people as possible; they all began and ended in Babi Yars. Babi Yar—that is the real symbol of your cultures and of your humanisms.]
It was very early in my life that I had first to delve into these concepts of culture and humanism with all their nuances, because from my very childhood my principal occupation was to try and avoid becoming the object of their attention. [That has remained my preoccupation all my life, and remains so to this very day … ]
When the tramcar drew up, the crowd scrambled in by the rear entrance while a German entered by the front. The tramcars were divided—the rear part was for the local population, and the front was for Aryans. When I had read about the Negroes in books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mister Twister I never imagined I would one day have to ride in a tramcar in the same way.
The tram went past shops and restaurants with large, bold signs posted up—UKRAINIANS NOT ADMITTED, GERMANS ONLY. Outside the opera was a theatre bill written entirely in German. The German flag with a swastika on it was flying over the building of the Academy of Science, now the main headquarters of the police. All in complete accord with GERMAN culture and GERMAN humanism.
The fire in the Kreshchatik had spread as far as the Bessarabka market and stopped outside it. Consequently one side of the square was nothing but frightful ruins, while the other side was bright with shop-signs and the lights of shop-windows, while the pavement was crowded with people, mostly German officers and their ladies.
It was very awkward and rather frightening to walk among them; it made you feel as though you had pushed yourself in somewhere where you had no right, and I will tell you why.
The officers—well-groomed, clean-shaven, with tightly fitting tunics and their caps down over their eyes—walked along without even noticing the local people; or, if they did glance at them, then it was just casually, like farmers looking round their cattle-yard and deciding what ought to be rebuilt, how to make the place more profitable and which animals to send to slaughter. And if a pair of searching eyes did happen to rest on you with real interest, then you were in trouble: it meant that you had attracted attention because you stood out in some way, and they might decide to get rid of you. Heaven preserve you from the attentions of those in authority.
The women, too, were beautifully turned out: in furs from head to foot, they moved like queens, many of them with smartly trimmed sheep-dogs on leads. However much I try to persuade myself, I have never since been able to rid myself of a feeling of cold resentment for those clever animals. I know it’s stupid, but those German sheep-dogs which are used to intimidate human beings in concentration camps all over the world automatically evoke in me a feeling of hostility, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Ay-li, ay-la-ay-la,
Ho-ho, ho-ho, ha-ha-ha … ’
It was already getting dark and I had still not done the most important thing I had to do, so I slid down from the boxes and rushed down the stairs. Gramp was snoring on his trestle bed. I slipped into the kitchen. That was what I was after!
The smell of freshly made soup still hung around the kitchen, but the stove was already quite cold. There were clusters of enormous, dry, clean saucepans on it. The frying-pans had also been cleaned. I poked around on the tables and underneath them and examined every corner, but there was nothing, not a crumb, not even a slop bucket. I had never in my life seen a kitchen so bare and so utterly clean. Yet there was still the fresh smell of cooking to torment me.
In an effort to find at least a grain of corn I started crawling around examining the cracks in the floor. But everything had been brushed up. I could scarcely believe it was true, and started my search all over again. In one of the saucepans something had been burnt, had stuck to the sides and had not been scrubbed off. I scratched it off and chewed on it, and still had no idea what it was. One of the frying-pans seemed to me not to have been properly cleaned. I sniffed at it and found it smelt of fried onions. The beastly cut-throats and vipers had even been putting fried onions into their own soup! It made me whimper, I longed so much for some soup flavoured with onion, and I started licking the frying-pan, either imagining or actually getting the faint taste of onion. I went on whimpering and licking, whimpering and licking.
ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
The Ukrainskoye Slovo newspaper was closed down in December. The slogan ‘Published in the Ukraine in Ukrainian’, which it had boldly displayed day after day, was regarded as harmful. They also closed down the literary almanack The Drum. This was the explanation:
A note to our readers.
As from today the Ukrainian-language newspaper will appear in a new form and will be called the Novoye Ukrainskoye Slovo. Extreme nationalists working with elements close to the Bolsheviks tried to turn the national Ukrainian newspaper into a news-sheet for their own treacherous purposes. No attention was paid to the many warnings given by the German civilian authorities that the paper must be neutral and serve only the interests of the Ukrainian people. An attempt was made to undermine the trust existing between our German liberators and the Ukrainian people.
The editorial board has been purged of traitorous elements.*
How well we understood the sense of that last line!
[The editor of Ukrainskoye Slovo, Ivan Rogach, and the brilliant poetess Olena Teliga, who had been President of the Writers’ Union and editor of The Drum, as well as many contributors to both publications, were executed in Babi Yar. At the same time large-scale arrests and executions of Ukrainian nationalists started to take place throughout the Ukraine.]
The new paper soon got down to business, it published an extremely violent article entitled ‘Scum’, in which it lashed out at the idlers—the scum—who didn’t want to find jobs for themselves: nobody knew what they lived on; they made money in various doubtful ways and were a disgrace to society. They had to be sought out and punished with all severity.
Another article was headed ‘The Whisperers’, and was about people who went around telling malicious jokes. Such nasty, crude jokes and sinister rumours were being put about by traitors and enemies of the people, they said, that firm measures would have to be taken to deal with such rumour-mongers and punish them severely.
[’Goodness gracious, you’re not pulling my leg every now and again, are you?’ my grandfather said in a frightened tone. ‘Are you sure that’s not a Bolshevik paper you’re reading sometimes?’
‘No, Gramp, it’s German! Look—there’s the Fascist sign.’]
Every day the newspaper’s tone became more nervous, and it was full of shouts and threats. Half the announcements were now only in German. And the bulletins from the Führer’s headquarters became much drier and briefer, but more alarming: ‘Powerful Attacks Repulsed in Bend of Donets’; ‘Soviet Attacks Repulsed on Eastern Front’.
My mother said that in newspapers you had always to read, not the words themselves, but between the lines.
That is what I learnt to do.
My grandfather saw the body of a man who had been hanged on Vladimir Hill. It hung there with the snow settling on it, with nothing on the feet, the head crooked to one side and the face quite black: either he had been severely beaten or his face had turned black after he was hanged. There was a placard on him saying he had attacked a German.
A mine exploded in the German headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Street. They grabbed everybody for that—not only young and middle-aged men but the old folk as well, and even women with babies, and it was said that more than a thousand people went to Babi Yar for that one mine. The City Commandant Eberhard no longer issued any proclamations.
By now we were afraid to go out on the streets—you never knew where the next explosion was going to be and whether you’d be taken off and shot for it … ‘You get yourself into such places,’ my mother exclaimed, ‘you are so late coming home; they’ll take a pot-shot at you one day, like shooting a rabbit; don’t you dare go out any more!’
It was terribly difficult trying to observe the curfew imposed by the Germans. There was no radio, and our clock went only when the spirit moved it, so that before going out my grandmother would go next door to find out the time, then look over the fence to see whether anyone was passing whom she could ask.
There were plenty of rumours going round: that they had shot some saboteurs in Babi Yar; that they were executing Ukrainian nationalists; that they were shooting people who infringed the black-out; shooting layabouts; shooting rumour-mongers; shooting partisans; shooting, shooting, shooting … The machine-gun chattered away in the ravine every day.
‘What on earth is happening?’ my mother asked as she listened to the sound of the shooting. ‘What is the world coming to?’
‘The Enemy is at hand. Be silent!’ said Grandma.
‘They keep killing off their “enemies of the people”, so that in the end there won’t be any people left. Then they will have achieved their ideal—there’ll be no people and no enemies, just peace and quiet.’
‘It’s true, Marusya, what it says in the Bible—that the Enemy shall consume himself.’
‘They’re shooting again, can’t you hear it? —they’re executing people … Will people never come to their senses?’
‘Marusya, my dear, we’ll all be dead long before that happens!’
* Novoye Ukrainskoye Slovo, December 14th, 1941.
WOUNDED ON THE STAIRS
I knew they’d be waiting for me and I was frightened long before I reached them. I took some crusts of bread out of my box, broke up a couple of boiled potatoes, wrapped them up and put them into the basket my grandmother had got ready.
It was fabulously valuable, that basket. There was a pot of fruit jelly in it, a little flask of milk, and even a tumbler full of fresh butter. I had forgotten what such food tasted like; it was like precious stones—beautiful to look at, but not to be eaten.
Near the market I jumped on the back of an empty lorry and squatted down against the cabin in the hope that the driver would not look out of his back window. He didn’t, and he drove so fast that I bumped about like a wooden doll, but he turned off near the tram terminus and I had to jump down. I had done so much jumping on and off those lorries I was like a cat. Most important was to catch them as they went round a corner, and if you had to jump off when they were going full speed the thing was to push yourself away from it with all your might so as to reduce your own speed. I learnt to do this perfectly after having landed once smack on my face in the roadway.
At the tram terminus I got on to a goods car and tucked myself away in the corner of the platform. The conductor came around collecting money, but I turned away as though I hadn’t seen him. I hadn’t any money to give him, in any case.
I hopped off in Podol and walked down Andrew’s Hill, which was lined with beggars all the way. Some of them were whining and begging openly for money, others exposed their amputated limbs in silence. There were other, quiet, intelligent-looking elderly men and women, some with spectacles and pince-nez, standing there; they were professors and teachers of various kinds, like our maths teacher who had died. In the case of some of them who sat there you couldn’t tell whether they were alive or dead. There had always been plenty of beggars about even before the war, but now there were so many it was simply frightful. They wandered all over the place, knocking on people’s doors, some of them people who had lost their homes through fire, some with babies, some of them on the run, and some swollen with hunger.
It was bitterly cold and the people walked down the streets with grim expressions on their faces, hunching themselves up from the wind, worried, in ragged clothes, in all sorts of strange footwear and threadbare coats. It was indeed a city of beggars.
St Andrew’s church stood on the very top of the steep hill, dominating the whole of Podol. It was built by Rastrelli;* blue and white, delicate, reaching to the skies. It was also besieged by beggars and there was a service going on inside. I straightway forced my way through and stood there listening and studying the paintings of famous masters on the walls. The inside of the church was richly decorated, with lots of gilding, and next to it, in unlovely contrast, was that ragged, starving, whining crowd of devout women beating their brows against the icy stone floor.
I couldn’t bear it for long, and climbed up into the tower. From there I had a bird’s-eye view of the Dnieper, Trukhanov Island and a long stretch of the left bank, including Darnitsa. Below me was a sea of roofs. To the left was just bare ground, where the Desyatinnaya church used to stand. That was where the legendary founders of Kievan Rus were buried and I wondered whether, if the foundations had been preserved, perhaps the bones of Princess Olga or Prince Vladimir had also by some miracle been preserved, and were still lying there and nobody knew about them. I so wanted to think about all these things. The church tower was a place where I always wanted to rest my elbows on the parapet and think.
A German officer who had clambered up through the snow to the top of the hill was taking photographs of the church from a rather odd angle below it and I, knowing a little about photography, watched how carefully he chose his spot. I was the only human figure to include in his picture and give it a little life.
Instead of moving away I stared straight at him and thought: So you click your shutter, then you’ll develop the film and make some prints and send them home to your family, so that they can see what your war has brought you. You photograph it as though it were your own property: you acquired the right to do so by shooting. But what have you to do with St Andrew’s church, or with Kiev itself? The fact that you came here shooting and murdering? Like a highway-robber? [What is this banditry going on all over the world? First one gang appeared, with their red banners and their fine slogans, murdering, robbing and destroying. Now another has arrived, also with red banners and fine slogans, also murdering, robbing and destroying. You are all bandits.] Some people build and work and labour in the sweat of their brows, then the looters come along, who have never created anything since the day they were born but who know how to shoot. And they grab everything for themselves. It is you, and only you, the ones who do the shooting, who are the real, genuine enemies, [whatever banners you choose to posture under.] HENCEFORWARD AND TO THE END OF MY DAYS I SHALL HATE YOU AND YOUR MISERABLE WEAPONS, MAYBE I SHALL DIE FROM HUNGER IN ONE OF YOUR PRISONS OR FROM ONE OF YOUR BULLETS, BUT I SHALL DIE FULL OF CONTEMPT FOR YOU AS THE MOST LOATHSOME THINGS ON THIS EARTH.
I left the church, breathing heavily from impotent rage, and came to myself only when I reached Bogdan Khmelnitsky Square, across which a strange column of skiers were making their way. They had no idea at all of how to get along on skis: they put their feet down awkwardly, slithered about and got their skis all mixed up. The square was full of the noise they made, and the soldiers looked rather pathetic, expressions of pain and annoyance on their faces. They had obviously been forced to try to master that rather difficult skill so that snow should no longer be an obstacle to their evil progress across the world. The officer was shouting at them and getting very cross. They shuffled along slowly in the direction of Vladimir Hill, and I very much wanted to go and watch them breaking their necks on it, but I was already late.
In the middle of the city, the trams were running. People were standing in the wind at the tram stop, among them a very undersized German in a light greatcoat and boots that were too small for him, wearing a soldier’s cap and woollen ear-muffs. He was badly chilled and quite blue in the face. His hands were shaking and he couldn’t keep them in his pockets as he kept fidgeting and jerking about, banging one foot against the other, wiping his face with his hands; then all of a sudden he started to dance about, kicking his feet out like a wooden clown, and he seemed to be on the verge of letting out a piercing howl, no longer able to bear the biting cold.
The fact that he looked rather silly could not have entered his head, because there were only local people standing around and for Germans that was as if the place was deserted. They moved about among us as though they were on their own, quite ready to let their trousers down, blow their noses with their fingers, or urinate openly on the street.
Two lorries drove out of the gateway of St Sophia’s cathedral, carrying something covered over with tarpaulin: once again they were carting off some loot. It was very odd: every tenth word they used was the word ‘culture’—‘the centuries-old German culture’, ‘the cultural revival of the world’, ‘the whole culture of mankind depends on the successes of German arms’ … It sounded fine; it was amazing what you can do with words.
This culture of theirs consisted, in effect, in their clearing every single thing out of the museums, using the manuscripts from the Ukrainian Academy for wrapping paper, taking potshots with their revolvers at statues, mirrors and gravestones—indeed at anything that offered itself as a target. That, it appeared, was the revival of culture.
And then there was the humanism. German humanism was the greatest in the world; the German Army was the most humane army, and everything it did was only to further German humanism. No, not just humanism, but GERMAN humanism, the most noble, intelligent and purposeful of all possible humanisms.
Because, it appears, there are as many humanisms in the world as there are murderers. Every murderer has his own, private and most noble brand of humanism, of course, just as he has private ways of reviving culture.
[We had had SOCIALIST culture—‘we shall destroy the old and build the new’ – and in its name they flattened the Desyatinnaya church to the ground, laid lorry-loads of explosives beneath the Cathedral of the Dormition, sent scholars off to Siberia and poisoned Gorky. There was also SOCIALIST humanism, in whose name the secret police went prowling around in their cars at night, murdered people, threw them into the ravine from the windows of the October Palace, and covered Siberia with whole settlements of concentration camps.
[That, it now appeared, had been wrong. GERMAN humanism was now put forward once again] as the opposite of that universal, diffuse, ineffective and therefore hostile humanism, for which there could be only one place—Babi Yar.
[Soviet humanism, German humanism, Assyrian humanism, Martian humanism—there were so many of them in the world, and the primary aim of each one of them was to kill off as many people as possible; they all began and ended in Babi Yars. Babi Yar—that is the real symbol of your cultures and of your humanisms.]
It was very early in my life that I had first to delve into these concepts of culture and humanism with all their nuances, because from my very childhood my principal occupation was to try and avoid becoming the object of their attention. [That has remained my preoccupation all my life, and remains so to this very day … ]
When the tramcar drew up, the crowd scrambled in by the rear entrance while a German entered by the front. The tramcars were divided—the rear part was for the local population, and the front was for Aryans. When I had read about the Negroes in books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mister Twister I never imagined I would one day have to ride in a tramcar in the same way.
The tram went past shops and restaurants with large, bold signs posted up—UKRAINIANS NOT ADMITTED, GERMANS ONLY. Outside the opera was a theatre bill written entirely in German. The German flag with a swastika on it was flying over the building of the Academy of Science, now the main headquarters of the police. All in complete accord with GERMAN culture and GERMAN humanism.
The fire in the Kreshchatik had spread as far as the Bessarabka market and stopped outside it. Consequently one side of the square was nothing but frightful ruins, while the other side was bright with shop-signs and the lights of shop-windows, while the pavement was crowded with people, mostly German officers and their ladies.
It was very awkward and rather frightening to walk among them; it made you feel as though you had pushed yourself in somewhere where you had no right, and I will tell you why.
The officers—well-groomed, clean-shaven, with tightly fitting tunics and their caps down over their eyes—walked along without even noticing the local people; or, if they did glance at them, then it was just casually, like farmers looking round their cattle-yard and deciding what ought to be rebuilt, how to make the place more profitable and which animals to send to slaughter. And if a pair of searching eyes did happen to rest on you with real interest, then you were in trouble: it meant that you had attracted attention because you stood out in some way, and they might decide to get rid of you. Heaven preserve you from the attentions of those in authority.
The women, too, were beautifully turned out: in furs from head to foot, they moved like queens, many of them with smartly trimmed sheep-dogs on leads. However much I try to persuade myself, I have never since been able to rid myself of a feeling of cold resentment for those clever animals. I know it’s stupid, but those German sheep-dogs which are used to intimidate human beings in concentration camps all over the world automatically evoke in me a feeling of hostility, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
