Babi Yar, page 3
The ravine was enormous, you might even say majestic: deep and wide, like a mountain gorge. If you stood on one side of it and shouted you would scarcely be heard on the other.
It is situated between three districts of Kiev—Lukyanovka, Kurenyovka and Syrets, surrounded by cemeteries, woods and allotments. Down at the bottom ran a little stream with clear water. The sides of the ravine were steep, even overhanging in places; landslides were frequent in Babi Yar. In fact it was typical of the whole region: the whole of the right bank of the Dnieper is cut into by such ravines; Kiev’s main street, the Kreshchatik, was formed out of the Kreshchaty ravine; there is a Repyakhov ravine, a Syrets ravine and others, many others.
On our way we caught sight of an old man, poorly dressed and with a bundle in his hand, making his way from one side of the ravine to the other. We guessed by the sureness of his step that he lived thereabouts and had used the path before.
‘Please, mister,’ I asked, ‘was it here they shot the Jews, or farther on?’
The old man stopped, looked me up and down and said:
‘And what about all the Russians who were killed here, and the Ukrainians and other kinds of people?’
And he went on his way.
We knew the stream like the palms of our hands. As children we had made little dams to hold it back and we had often swum in it.
The river bed was of good, coarse sand, but now for some reason or other the sand was mixed with little white stones.
I bent down and picked one of them up to look at it more closely. It was a small piece of bone, about as big as a fingernail, and it was charred on one side and white on the other. The stream was washing these pieces of bone out of somewhere and carrying them down with it. From this we concluded that the place where the Jews, Russians, Ukrainians and people of other nationalities had been shot was somewhere higher up.
We carried on walking for a long time on these bits of bone until we reached the very top of the ravine, and the stream disappeared in the place where it was first formed by the many springs which trickled from the layers of sandstone. It must have been from there that it carried the bones down.
At this point the ravine became much narrower and split into several branches, and in one place we saw that the sand had turned grey. Suddenly we realized we were walking on human ashes.
Near by there had been a fall of sand, following the rains, which had exposed an angular projection of granite and a seam of coal about a foot thick.
There were goats grazing on the hillside with three little boys, each about eight years old, looking after them. They were hacking away diligently at the coal with little picks and breaking it up on the granite block.
We went up to them. The coal was brown and crumbly, as though it was a mixture of the ashes from a railway engine and carpenter’s glue.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘See here!’ And one of them pulled out of his pocket a handful of something which glittered where it was not covered in dirt, and spread it out on his hand.
It was a collection of half-melted gold rings, ear-rings and teeth.
They were digging for gold.
We walked around the place and found many whole bones, a skull, still not dried out, of someone recently buried, and more pieces of black ash among the grey sand.
I picked up one of the pieces weighing four or five pounds and took it with me to keep. It contains the ashes of many people, all mixed up together—a sort of international mixture.
It was then that I decided that I must write it all down, from the very beginning, just as it really happened, leaving nothing out and making nothing up.
And that is what I am doing, because I know I have to do it, because, as it says in Till Eulenspiegel, Klaas’s ashes are knocking at my heart.
So the word ‘Document’ which appears in the sub-title of this novel means that I have included in it only facts and documents, and that it contains not the slightest element of literary invention — of what ‘might have been’ or what ‘ought to have been’.
Part One
THE END OF SOVIET RULE
Soviet Informburo
Evening Bulletin
September 21st, 1941
In the course of September 21st our troops continued to fight the enemy along the whole front. After many days of bitter fighting our troops withdrew from Kiev.*
I saw them running and knew that it was all over. The men of the Red Army in their faded khaki uniforms, some of them with packs on their backs, others without even their weapons, were running in twos and threes through the courtyards and across the back gardens and jumping over fences.
Stories were told later about the soldiers rushing into the houses and pleading for civilian clothes. The women quickly dug out some old rags, the men changed into them in the hope of hiding themselves, and the women stuffed their useless weapons and tunics with badges of rank into the cesspools.
Then it became very quiet. The fighting had been going on for many days, with cannons thundering, sirens wailing and air raids coming one on top of the other. At night the whole horizon had been lit up by flashes and fires. We had slept on our bundles in a trench, with the earth shaking and bits of it falling on our heads.
But now it was quiet—the sort of quiet which seemed worse than any shooting. And we didn’t know where we were: still under Stalin, already under Hitler, or were we in a narrow strip in between?
A machine-gun could be heard chattering away very clearly near by, from the direction of the railway embankment. Little branches and leaves were falling off the old elm tree above the trench. I crashed through the entrance-hole and tumbled into the dugout, where my grandfather silenced me and gave me a clout.
We had dug our trench in the garden; it was the usual kind of air-raid shelter—the ‘slit-trench’—of those days, shaped like a letter T, six to seven feet deep and about two and a half feet across. There were similar trenches in all the courtyards, squares and streets; the government had appealed over the radio for people to dig them and explained how to do it.
But my grandfather and I had put in several days’ work improving the design. We had lined the earth walls with boards, paved the floor with bricks and covered over the top. We did not, of course, have enough timber to do it properly, but we laid some nine-foot boards across the top of the trench and then piled on top of them all the pieces of wood we could find in the barn.
My grandfather had worked it out that if a bomb were to fall on the trench it would, he explained, hit the pieces of wood first and they would cannon off it like billiard balls and the explosion would never reach us. The damned thing would have no hope of destroying such a fortress!
To make it even stronger we shovelled earth on top of the wood and then covered it with turf to camouflage it, so that we had an impressive and clearly recognizable hillock beneath which, when the entrance-hole was shut, it was as quiet and as dark as the grave.
It was our good fortune that nothing exploded near our trench and that not even a sizeable piece of shrapnel fell there, otherwise all that wood would have come tumbling down on our heads. But at that time we were still unaware of this and were only proud of our handiwork and quite sure we had provided ourselves with a perfect shelter.
Earlier, when we did not have such a fine air-raid shelter, my grandfather, my grandmother and I used to hide from the bombs beneath the bed.
It was an old-fashioned bed, good and strong, and the ends were made of sheets of metal with pictures painted on them in oils—mills, lakes with swans, and castles. We reckoned that if a bomb were to fall it would come through the roof and the ceiling, bounce off the spring mattress and explode. But the eiderdown on top of two quilted blankets would not, of course, let any splinters through.
So that we should not have to lie on the bare floor my grandmother used to spread a blanket under the bed and put some pillows on it, which made it really quite cosy.
Whenever the shooting started and the windows began to rattle from the whine of the dive-bombers, Grandpa would be the first to dive under the bed. He would work his way across as far as possible and squeeze himself up close to the wall. Next I would tumble in and squeeze up to him. And then Grandma, who was everlastingly pottering around the stove, would grab our cat, Titus, and lie down on the outside, protecting us all with her own body. That was how we used to look after ourselves.
Grandpa would say a prayer under his breath and then demand of me crossly:
‘Why on earth do you keep on wriggling about, you silly gomon? Have you got a worm inside you?’
Once we had finished the construction of our mighty trench we used to take refuge in it in the same order, only now Grandma always had to take the pillows and a blanket with her. (She never left them in the trench, so that they should not get damp.)
Titus the cat had become accustomed to war; at the very first sound of shooting he would rush, tail high, in tremendous bounds across to the entrance to the trench and stay there miaowing with terror in his eyes until he was let in. He knew only how to climb up the hanging ladder and had not learnt how to get down it.
I still don’t know where my grandfather came across that word gomon. He is dead now, and I forgot to ask him. But it is true that a worm of curiosity was always nagging at me. I used to wriggle out of the trench to watch the planes and see the beastly crosses on them, and I used to try and see the bombs exploding.
But now, when I saw the Red Army men on the run and it became obvious that it was all over, I was frightened—really frightened—at last.
We had a paraffin lamp burning in the trench which smelt badly. My mother (who until now had been on duty day and night in her school) was sitting on a stool, stark terror in her eyes. My grandfather was eating; he always ate when he was nervous. His grey beard, with two pointed ends, wagged up and down because he had false teeth and did not chew his food but munched it, Grandma used to say, the crumbs dropping into his beard. Grandma was muttering a scarcely audible prayer and crossing herself in front of an icon of the Virgin which she had brought into the trench. I myself had put a nail into a board to hang the icon on. I was very fond of it; it was my favourite among all the icons my grandmother possessed.
Somewhere in the walls, behind the boards, there was some quiet rustling and movement; the beetles and the worms and the busy ants lived out their lives there unseen, utterly indifferent to the war.
But at last the earth had ceased to tremble and fall on our heads, and it seemed as though, in that ominous silence, something utterly frightful was about to happen, some explosion such as we had never heard before.
I just sat there, scarcely breathing, waiting for it to happen …
Suddenly there was the muffled sound of footsteps, the flap over the entrance was lifted, and there stood our neighbour, Yelena Pavlovna, looking strange and quite beside herself. With joy and wonder and triumph in her voice she exclaimed:
‘What are you sitting there for? The Germans are here! It’s the end of Soviet rule!’
I was twelve years old, and a lot of things were happening to me for the first time in my life. It was certainly the first time the Germans had arrived, and I rushed out of the trench before the others, screwing up my eyes because of the strong light, and noticed that the world had become somehow different—like fine weather following a storm—although outwardly everything seemed to be unchanged.
Yelena Pavlovna was gasping for breath, waving her hands about, and saying tenderly and happily:
‘So young, such a young lad standing there! My windows look out on to the street. The truck drove off, but he stayed there, this young one, a good-looking boy!’
I immediately rushed across the yard and skipped over the fence.
Near the fence which ran round the garden in our Peter-Paul Square there was a low-slung, evil-looking, long-nosed gun standing on fat rubber tyres. And next to it was a German soldier who was indeed very young and very fair, rosy-cheeked, and wearing a remarkably clean and well-fitting grey-green uniform. He was holding a rifle at the ready, and when he noticed that I was looking at him he drew himself up proudly. But he did it in a very pleasant way, as though he was just playing a part.
I had a lifelong friend, three years older than myself, Bolik Kaminsky, about whom I shall have more to say later. He had been evacuated along with other apprentices at the factory school. Well, this German lad was very like my friend Bolik.
You see, I had been expecting absolutely everything: that Germans were terrifying giants of men, swarming over their tanks in gas-masks and horned helmets; and I was shocked to see that this lad was so ordinary, so … well, nothing unusual, just like our Bolik.
There he was, showing off, as I too would have been showing off if I had a gun like that.
At that moment came the sound of the outsize explosion that I had been expecting. I caught my breath, hit my chin on the top of the fence and nearly fell off it. And, to his shame, the young soldier went down on his knees, cowering close to the gun in fright.
But, to give him his due, he came to his senses at once, stood up of his own accord and began staring at something somewhere above my head. I turned round and saw broken pieces of wood twisting and floating high in the blue sky above the tops of the trees and falling slowly to earth.
‘Ha, so they’ve blown up the bridge after all, the bloody wastrels!’ said Grandpa, coming across to the fence and poking his nose over the top so that he also could have a look at the first German. ‘My goodness, what a sight! God Almighty, what hope has Stalin got of fighting them! That’s a real army! Not like our poor devils, hungry and barefoot. Just look at the way he’s dressed!’
The young soldier really was very well turned out. In newspaper cartoons and Soviet films the Germans were always made to look like ragged beggars and bandits, while Soviet soldiers were always good-looking, smartly turned out and pink-cheeked.
An angular, box-like, predatory-looking truck drew up in a cloud of dust, turned swiftly round (Grandpa and I followed all this very closely) and some more young German boys, also very smartly turned out and as deft as jugglers, hooked the gun on to the truck in one quick move and hopped on to the running-boards; with them hanging on to each side, the truck shot off at top speed in the direction of Podol.
‘Yes,’ said my grandfather, quite staggered by all this, and crossing himself with a sweeping gesture. ‘Thank the Lord, the rule of the down-and-outs has come to an end, I thought I’d never live to see the day … Come on, give us a hand to get these things into the house; everything’s damp in the trench. Now we can have a decent life.’
I went rather unwillingly across to the trench. There my mother was handing bundles, cases and stools out of the dark hole and Grandma was taking them and putting them together in a pile. I started to carry them indoors.
We had repeated this operation so many times recently: into the trench, out of the trench, up and down. If only there had been something worth saving, but there was nothing but old, ragged clothes, sheepskin coat from Tsarist days, all patched and moth-eaten, a pair of faded trousers, a few cushions … In short, it was not a man’s job.
At that moment the head of my second friend, Shurka Matso, peered over the top of the fence. With his eyes almost popping out of his head he called out:
‘The Germans are coming down the tramline! Let’s go!’
I was off like the wind.
The whole of the Kirillovskaya (under Soviet rule it had been renamed Frunze Street, but the name did not catch on), as far as you could see in both directions, was jammed with trucks and other vehicles. The cars were very angular, with all sorts of things sticking out, netting thrown over them and things hanging down. Every motor-vehicle has its own face, and eyes the world through its headlights indifferently or angrily, with sorrow or surprise. These, like the one that came to take the gun away, had a predatory look. I had never seen such machines in all my life; they seemed to me to be immensely powerful and they filled the whole street with the roar and fumes of their engines.
The bodies built on some of the lorries were like little houses, fitted out with beds and with tables screwed to the floor.
The Germans were staring around out of their vehicles and strolling down the street—clean-shaven, wide awake and very cheerful. It was not, I thought, so difficult to be bright and cheerful in the infantry if, like them, you didn’t have to march but rode in trucks! They laughed at anything that amused them and called out something funny to the first of the local people to creep out on to the streets. Dashing motorcyclists in helmets, with machine-guns mounted on their handlebars, swept through between wagons laden with shells and kit-bags.
The heavy weapons were being pulled, as though they were only toys, by enormous bay work-horses such as we had never seen before. With manes the colour of straw, moving their shaggy hooves forward slowly and surely, harnessed together in teams of six, they made light work of drawing the heavy weapons. Our stunted Russian nags, half-dead from lack of fodder, on which the Red Army was retreating would have looked like foals alongside these giants.
The officers in their tall peaked caps with silver braid travelled in dazzling black and white limousines, chatting cheerfully among themselves. We, Shurka and I, caught our breath and scarcely knew where to look next. Then we plucked up the courage to run across the road. The pavements were quickly filling up with people rushing in from all sides. Like us, they first looked at this armada in amazement, then began to smile at the Germans in reply and to try and start up conversations with them.
As for the Germans, practically all of them had little conversation-books which they were quickly looking through and calling out to the girls on the pavement:
‘Hey, girl, miss … ! Bolshevik—finish. Ukraina!’
‘Ukrayéena,’ the girls corrected them with a laugh.
‘Ja, ja. U-kray-éena! Go walk, spazieren, bitte!’
The girls giggled and blushed, and all the people around were laughing and smiling.
