Babi Yar, page 43
You must know that feeling, when you look at the sky in the morning and it makes you want to make the most of the day ahead. If you are not working it makes you want to get your things together quickly, pack some sandwiches and go off fishing, or just for a walk.
It was the day of the decisive battle for Kiev, and now, when I re-live the way it began, I cannot for the life of me understand why, on this beautiful, blessed earth—among people equipped with brains and the capacity to think, who are not just animals with instincts, among thinking, understanding beings—it is possible for people to indulge in such absolute madness as war, dictatorship, police terror, to kill each other and to humiliate each other sadistically.
I know, of course, that this has all been carefully analysed by experts in all the ‘-isms,’ and that in their view it has all been explained politically, historically, economically and psychologically. Everything has been examined, proved and all is clear. All the same, I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
Herman and the driver ladled water out of the rainwater-butt and washed themselves, laughing and splashing about. The ginger-haired Franz was going round looking rather chastened: he must have had a hangover after the previous night’s goings-on. But he tried to give the impression that nothing had happened.
My mother made a fire from some sticks and started preparing a meal. In daylight the Germans’ vehicle no longer looked frightening; it was quite an ordinary lorry for going across rough country, with wheels at the front, a caterpillar track at the rear and a tarpaulin cover. It was standing quietly near the house, staring at the world attentively and questioningly through its headlights, smelling of petrol and covered with dust.
Franz and Herman lifted the tarpaulin and started unloading sacks of potatoes from the back. I hung around, trying to work out why they had so many potatoes.
But it turned out that underneath the potatoes were shells. Either the quartermaster had made them carry the potatoes, or they had stolen them from somewhere. In any case they had no intention of bartering them. They unloaded every single thing, asked for a brush and cleaned out the back of the vehicle. Herman untied a sack, tipped about fifty pounds of potatoes out on the ground and signed to me to take them: they were for us.
Suddenly the earth began to shake.
It was so strange and unexpected that I had no time to be afraid. The ground simply trembled beneath our feet as it does, no doubt, during an earthquake; the wood-pile in the barn collapsed, and the doors banged. Those earth tremors continued for some seconds in that clear sky and bright morning, followed by the sound of explosions from the direction of Pushcha-Voditsa.
It was not so much the thud of individual explosions as a continual roar—a veritable avalanche, a sea of sound. I have never in my life heard anything like it, and I don’t want to: it was as if the earth itself was exploding and turning inside out.
Some force threw me out into the middle of the yard, and I couldn’t understand what had happened or why, whether the whole world was collapsing, or whether there was a gigantic tidal wave sweeping over the earth. And the Germans also started scurrying about, looking anxiously in the direction of the noise, though there was nothing but the blue sky to be seen beyond the embankment.
The driver quickly climbed up on to the cab and peered around, but he could make nothing out either. At this point the Germans exchanged a few short sentences, and quickly and efficiently proceeded to load the potatoes and shells back on to the lorry. Herman ran into the house and brought out the submachine-guns. Franz got out their helmets and gave them to the others.
Far beyond the embankment, above Pushcha-Voditsa, some planes appeared—just little black points in the sky. They couldn’t be heard because of the din; they were just little spots moving across the sky like mosquitoes. The sky around them was immediately filled with white puffs of smoke. They flew quickly over Pushcha-Voditsa and had hardly gone out of sight when a second wave came from beyond the Dnieper, this time rather nearer us. They flew in formation through the exploding anti-aircraft shells, and they were followed by a third wave, even closer to us. They came in, wave after wave, to bomb Pushcha-Voditsa, each time covering a different area, one after the other, right on the target.
Franz, Herman and the driver left their lorry and stood by the barn in their helmets, holding their submachine-guns, looking very earnest and very much on the alert. Another formation of planes flew over the edge of the forest, just over the ‘Cheer-Up’ sanatorium, even closer …
I went over to them and stood by them, listening to what they said. They were talking to each other quietly, never taking their eyes off the furious, gripping show that was being put on in the sky.
‘Ilyushin.’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s a trench over there.’
‘Put the sights up.’
Franz, the red-haired one, took me by the shoulder and proceeded to say something, very seriously and anxiously, pointing to the garden and to my mother. Run for it, he was saying, take cover.
‘Bang, bang. Soviet Ilyushin … Schwarzer Tod.’
I nodded my head but didn’t go away, I don’t know why. Everything within me was strained to the limit. The ‘Black Deaths’ were getting nearer and perhaps my last minutes of life had arrived.
At that moment one of the planes burst into flames. It flew on slowly, one wing down, and disappeared behind the embankment. A parachute opened, dome-shaped, in the sky—a member of the crew had managed to get clear and the wind was carrying him towards the forest. The tiny figure of a man hung suspended beneath the white circle of the parachute, utterly defenceless against the anti-aircraft fire. I don’t think he can have reached the ground alive, and if he did he must have fallen into German hands. The Germans showed no signs of pleasure at the sight. They watched him descend and disappear just as glumly as I did.
The dive-bombers came shooting over the embankment practically at ground level, black against the sky, making a terrible whine. They were both bombing and strafing: it was a hail of fire, and bits of debris, wood and earth were thrown up in the air. The sky was dotted with explosions. The next wave was due to pass over us.
And it did.
They zoomed out from behind the gardens and houses, terribly low, so fantastically low you could almost touch them. The roar of their engines drowned the sound of voices, and they flashed past in threes, their guns firing ahead of them. The last thing I remember is Franz, pressed up against the barn, spread out in an unnatural position, aiming up in the air with a machine-gun which was shaking as it fired. But it was like a silent film—the machine-gun rattled away, but no sound came from it because of the unbroken roar of the engines. And everything was shaking.
I was thrown to the ground and let out a penetrating yell: ‘Bombs!’ which I couldn’t even hear myself and which came out something like ‘Bo-ow-ee!’. It went dark, then it was light again, earth was thrown up in the air and fell to the ground, and I found myself scrambling along on my hands and knees and nearly banged my head into the porch. Then there were no more planes.
Herman then appeared from behind the barn, his face contorted, covered in earth from head to foot. He grabbed a fresh cartridge clip from the half-track to reload his submachine-gun. But he was too slow.
Another group of planes shot out like black arrows from behind the gardens and houses. Herman crept underneath the tracks of the lorry. I dived into the house and only just had time to get inside and press myself up flat against the stove when the whole house, stove and all, rocked. Through the window opposite me I saw a blinding flash in a lilac bush near the entrance and pieces of gate and fence flew in the air. At the same moment a pane of glass in the window cracked in the shape of a star, a cloud of plaster and dust fell on me, and I felt something brush across the hair on the top of my head, like a hand. The planes disappeared, but I could still hear the sound of breaking glass.
I started to clean myself off mechanically in the usual way, shook my head to get the plaster out of it, glanced at the stove and saw, to my great surprise, that a perfectly round hole had been made in it just an inch above the top of my head. Scarcely believing my eyes, I leant with my back up against the stove again and poked my finger into the hole. Now I knew what had brushed across my hair. I went round the stove to look at it from the other side. The other side was undamaged, which meant that the piece of shrapnel had been stopped inside the stove.
Now at last I realized that I would have to take refuge in the trench. I had no idea where my mother had got to. I went outside, looked around and thought: ‘Perhaps she’s already there,’ and at that moment more planes came over from behind the houses.
I must have been in a state of shock, because I dashed off like a hare across the flat, exposed garden towards the trench, knowing full well what a beautiful target I offered and that I should never make it.
With one little part of my mind I saw that the planes were already ahead of me, that alongside me in the garden there was an enormous hole and everything round it was covered with a layer of light earth into which my feet sank, leaving a line of tracks in the sand.
The planes had gone over—that was the main thing. I had seen the pilots’ heads and the red stars on the wings, and with the same little part of my mind I had noticed little columns of sand spurting up around me, and felt very hurt that they should try to kill me, poor little me, taking me to be a German. I was cross rather with myself and my fate, because at that speed they couldn’t be expected to distinguish who was beneath them, German or non-German, especially since they knew the population had left the city.
There were many little columns of sand spurting up, but I somehow managed to dodge between them. The planes had long passed over, but I kept on running towards the trench. I tumbled into it, half-deafened, and dived into the darkest and farthest corner, bumping right into my mother. What joy! There she was, alive and well. But then there was another roar of sound.
The planes shot out from behind the houses and the earth began to shake as though some infuriated giant was drumming
on it, the beams across the trench started to tremble, and earth began to pour down on us. My mother pushed me roughly into the bottom of the trench and fell on top of me, covering me up with her body, and when the din subsided she glanced out, muttering as though in prayer:
‘That’s the way, that’s the way to treat ’em!’
She seized hold of me, nearly out of her mind, rocking to and fro and saying, not so much to me as to ‘them’:
‘Never mind if we have to die, just drop as many as you can. Hit ’em as hard as you can! Never mind about us, so long as you get them!’
I am afraid you will not understand this or believe it. The people in the planes were OUR PEOPLE and they were strafing and routing the OTHERS, giving them what they deserved. That was the way to drive them out, the scoundrels.
‘Go for ’em, lads, go for ’em!’
That was how it started.
Human beings have an amazing capacity for adaptation. By lunchtime I could already tell by the sound which way the planes were coming and how great the danger was. I started to get accustomed to that kind of life. In the intervals I would run into the house.
It was a real sight: the walls were pitted with shrapnel, every pane of glass was out, and the roof looked as though someone had been shovelling sand on it; there were scorched bricks lying on it, though the chimney was undamaged. The hole which the bomb had left next to the house was big enough to take a couple of lorries. And there were many smaller craters all over the place, as if the earth had smallpox.
The German gunners were now sitting in a slit trench behind the barn, huddled up together, smothered with earth, no longer firing from their machine-guns but obviously thinking of one thing alone—how to save their skins. Their guns were lying in the yard.
Franz waved to me and shouted:
‘Get away, get away, boy!’
I dismissed his advice with a gesture, then surveyed the scene and thought: Pity the bomb didn’t carry another twenty yards, it would have landed right on the lorry and gun. Of course, then there wouldn’t have been anything left of our house.
A very worried-looking soldier came in through the broken-down fence and beckoned the gunners, who crept cautiously out of the trench. But at that moment a plane came over, and they dashed like rabbits back into the trench. ‘Aha!’ I thought. ‘One plane’s enough to scare you now.’
After waiting a little they ran after the soldier, and I went along to see what was going on. The house next but one to us, where the Korzhenevskys had lived, was no longer there. In its place was a gaping hole partly filled with boards and spattered with blood.
Next to it stood a poplar tree, all cut about by shrapnel, with the door of the house hanging in the top of it, caught in the branches. That was where the bricks which had landed on our roof had come from.
The soldier and the gunners started pulling the boards out of the hole. On the table in the yard there were some bright red pieces of flesh covered with sand, and some had strips of cloth stuck to them. I thought perhaps they had been killing a cow. But then I saw the Germans bringing more pieces out of the hole, handing them from one to the other and piling them up on the table. There was a piece of a head with teeth sticking out. I felt sick and went away.
I have noticed more than once that bad weather accompanies a heavy bombardment. Perhaps it was only a coincidence that following the din from the direction of Pushcha-Voditsa the sky which had been so clear in the morning started clouding over by the middle of the day, and low, grey clouds made the day dull and miserable. But they didn’t interfere with the dive-bombers —the ‘Black Deaths’— which flew almost at ground level.
The Germans were standing around the water-butt, cleaning the blood off their hands, when a horseman came galloping down the street. He shouted something in a sharp, guttural voice, and they rushed to the half-track. The motor belched a cloud of fumes and they drove through the gate and turned sharply, the gun bouncing along behind. In the distance other vehicles started up and moved off, clanking down the road to the north, towards Pushcha-Voditsa, into the inferno.
Thursday, November 4th
We thought we should never see them again, but they came back … That night the earth tremors and the sound of the guns had subsided. Then suddenly our windows were lit up by headlights, the half-track drove into the yard and stopped by the lilac bush. I thought to myself: ‘So that’s the way they do it: they go off to battle as if they were going to work and come back home to sleep at night.’
They didn’t come straight into the house but set about camouflaging their vehicle with branches broken off the trees in the darkness. I went outside but they took no notice of me. They unhitched their gun and rolled it out on to the street, pointing the barrel in the direction of the embankment.
The tarpaulin cover was hanging on the half-track in strips. And when they came into the room and lit their lamp their appearance was indescribable: their hands, covered with burns and soot and bandaged up, were trembling. Young Herman looked particularly shaken. He pottered aimlessly about the room and seemed to be on the verge of tears. Franz handed me a kettle and asked me to bring him some water.
‘Was it a heavy attack?’ I asked.
‘Oh!’ said Franz, and they all started talking at once, explaining and describing: they needed to get it out of themselves, and they did their best to explain by means of signs and all the languages of Europe just how awful it had been, impossible to describe—the hail of fire, the inferno … Herman pulled a little dictionary out of his satchel, poked about in it until he found the word he wanted and then repeated it several times with a terrible look in his eyes:
‘Horror. Horror! Understand? Horror!’
From the stream of words I gathered the general sense: that France or Africa had been health resorts compared with that day’s battle. The Russians were attacking with Katyusha rocket guns. The noise and the earth tremors of the morning had been mainly due to the Katyushas. The Russians had advanced from the village of Petrivtsy and moved into Pushcha-Voditsa. The German units had been overrun and routed, the forest was ablaze and the very earth burning. They themselves couldn’t understand how they were still alive.
‘Oh, my boy, my boy!’ Franz clutched his head of red hair between his hands, shook it from side to side and stayed like that, resting his elbows on the tables.
It was all so sudden: when they arrived they had been so full of life, so manly, and now they were behaving like frightened women.
‘Does Franz have any children?’ I asked Herman quietly.
‘Ja,’ Herman replied. ‘There are three children. Drei.’
I went outside. The horizon was lit up in several places in a bright crimson glow, giving the night a sort of blood-red appearance. From time to time came the sound of gunfire.
Then I heard the sound of motor horns near the school, of orders being given and hysterical screams. Driven on by some demonic urge I went out on to the street, keeping close to the fence, and made my way stealthily towards the school, with the idea of seeing what was going on and, if I found a gun lying about somewhere, of grabbing it.
Near the Engstrem house I was halted by a sudden sense of fear. I turned my head, trying to make out what was threatening, and in the crimson light reflected from the sky I could see someone moving inside the wire fence.
It was a man with a bag or a box hanging at his side. He stood there motionless, looking straight at me. I stood stock still, as though I had been hypnotized. I still had the impression that he did not see me, or it may have been that he hoped I did not see him.
After standing for a moment like that I withdrew slowly and noiselessly and ducked into the house, where I found myself shaking all over, as though I had seen a ghost. Only next evening did I realize who the man was.
The glow in the sky kept dying down and then flaring up again right through the night. The German gunners did not drink or play the mouth-organ now—they just slept, quite exhausted.
