BABI YAR 1941

Jewish Virtual Library

The Babi Yar Massacre
(September 29-30, 1941)

Babi Yar is a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where Einsatzgruppen mobile squads killed at least 34,000 Jews over a one week period in September 1941. Russian estimates put the number of killed at nearly 100,000. Today, Babi Yar has come to symbolize the horrific murder of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen as well as the persistent failure of the world to acknowledge this Jewish tragedy.

With the initiation of Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s assault on the Soviet Union, the mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen operated over a wide area of Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea. There were four main divisions of the Einsatzgruppen—Groups A, B, C and D. All under Heydrich's general command, these groups operated behind the advancing German troops to eliminate political criminals, Polish government officials, Roma and Jews. Jews were rounded up in every village, transported to a wooded area, or a ravine, stripped, shot and buried.

On September 19, 1941, the German army captured Kiev, Ukraine. Within a week, a number of buildings occupied by the German military were blown up by the Soviet secret police and in retaliation, the Germans proceeded to kill all the Jews of Kiev.

 
An order was posted throughout the city in both Russian and Ukrainian:
Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 7:00 A.M. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables and warm clothing at Dorogozhitshaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.

From the cemetery, the Jews were marched to Babi Yar, a ravine only two miles from the center of the city. A truck driver at the scene described what he saw:
I watched what happened when the Jews—men, women and children—arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after another they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear. They had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly…I don't think it was even a minute from the time each Jew took off his coat before he was standing there completely naked….

Once undressed, the Jews were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep…When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schultpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. That all happened very quickly. The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun…I saw these marksman stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other…The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew who had meanwhile lain down and shoot him.

....On that day I may have shot some 150 to 250 Jews. The whole shooting episode went off without a hitch. The Jews surrendered to their fate like sheep to the slaughter,” reads the description of the slaughter by SS man by the name of Viktor Trill. “I saw a huge hole that looked like a riverbed that had dried up. Inside it were layers of bodies. The Jews had to lie down on the bodies and were shot in the neck.

Over the next week, 33,771 Jews were murdered at Babi Yar. Over the following months, Babi Yar remained in use as an execution site for gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war. Soviet accounts after the war speak of 100,000 dead and while research does not substantiate such a number the true figure will likely never be known.

Historian Abram Sachar provides a description of the extermination at Babi Yar:
Nearly 34,000 Jews of the ghetto were brought to a suburban ravine known as Babi Yar, near the Jewish Cemetery, where men, women, and children were systematically machine-gunned in a two-day orgy of execution. In subsequent months, most of the remaining population was exterminated …

... The Jews in their thousands, with such pathetic belongings as they could carry, were herded into barbed-wire areas at the top of the ravine, guarded by Ukrainian collaborators. There they were stripped of their clothes and beaten, then led in irregular squads down the side of the ravine. The first groups were forced to lie on the ground, face down, and were machine-gunned by the Germans who kept up a steady volley. The riddled bodies were covered with thin layers of earth and the next groups were ordered to lie over them, to be similarly dispatched. To carry out the murder of 34,000 human beings in the space of two days could not assure that all the victims had died. Hence there were a few who survived and, though badly wounded, managed to crawl from under the corpses and seek a hiding place.

In August 1943, with the Red Army advancing, the Nazis dug up the bodies from the mass graves of Babi Yar and burned them in an attempt to remove the evidence of mass murder. Paul Blobel, the commander of Sonderokmmando 4a, whose troops had slaughtered the Jews of Kiev, returned to Babi Yar. For more than a month, his men and workers conscripted from the ranks of concentration camp inmates dug up the bodies. Bulldozers were required to reopen the mounds. Massive bone-crushing machinery was brought to the scene. The bodies were piled on wooden logs, doused with gas, and ignited.

When the work was done, the workers from the concentration camp were killed. Under cover of darkness on September 29, 1943, 25 of them escaped. Fifteen survived to tell what they had seen.

Despite efforts to suppress the memory of Babi Yar, after the war the Soviet public learned of the murders through newspaper accounts, official reports and belles lettres. In 1947, I. Ehrenburg in his novel Burya (The Storm) described dramatically the mass killing of the Jews of Kiev in Babi Yar. Preparations were made for a monument at Babi Yaras a memorial to the victims of Nazi genocide. The architect A.V. Vlasov had designed a memorial and the artist B. Ovchinnikov had produced the necessary sketches.

After the Soviet anti-Semitic campaign of 1948, an effort was made to eliminate all references to Babi Yar with the objective to remove from Jewish consciousness those historical elements that might sustain it. Even after the death of Stalin, Babi Yar remained lost in the “memory hole” of history.

 
Intellectuals, however, refused to be silent. On October 10, 1959, novelist Viktor Nekrasov cried out in the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta for a memorial at Babi Yar, and against the official intention to transform the ravine into a sports stadium. Far more impressive was the poem Babi Yar written by Yevgeni Yevtushenko published in the same journal on September 19, 1961:

No gravestone stands on Babi Yar;


Only coarse earth heaped roughly on the gash:


Such dread comes over me.

With its open attack upon anti-Semitism and its implied denunciation of those who rejected Jewish martyrdom, the poem exerted a profound impact on Soviet youth as well as upon world public opinion. Dmitri Shostakovich set the lines to music in his 13th Symphony, performed for the first time in December 1962.

Russian ultranationalism struck back almost immediately. Yevtushenko was sharply criticized by a number of literary apologists of the regime and then publicly denounced by Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Pravda on March 8, 1963. The theme of a specific Jewish martyrdom was condemned. But Babi Yar would not remain suppressed. It again surfaced during the summer of 1966 in a documentary novel written by Anatoly Kuznetsov published in Yunost (Eng. tr. 1967). Earlier that year the Ukrainian Architects Club in Kiev held a public exhibit of more than 200 projects and some 30 large-scale detailed plans for a memorial to Babi Yar. None of the inscriptions in the proposed plans mentioned Jewish martyrdom. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did the new Ukrainian government acknowledge the specific Jewish nature of the site and an appropriate rededication was held.

On October 6, 2021, the presidents of Ukraine, Israel, and Germany inaugurated a memorial center for the victims at the site of the massacre and attended the unveiling of the “Crystal Crying Wall” memorial The names of 159 of the Nazi soldiers who participated in the killings were also released.

The center, which is still under construction, will be dedicated to the stories of Eastern European Jews who were killed and buried in mass graves during the Holocaust.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Y. Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography (London, 1963); W. Korey, in: New Republic (Jan. 8, 1962); idem, in: Saturday Review (Feb. 3, 1968); S.M. Schwarz, Yevrei v Sovetskom Soyuze 1939–1965 (1966), 359–71. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Klee, W. Dressen, and V. Riess, The Good Old Days: The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (1988); I. Ehrenburg and V. Grossman, The Black Book (1981).

Sources: Abram L. Sachar, The Redemption of the Unwanted. New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1983).
The Holocaust\Shoah Page.
Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.
Ofer Aderet, “‘I shot hundreds of Jews that day’: Babi Yar perpetrators' testimonies revealed,” Haaretz, (October 6, 2021).
Yuras Karmanau, “Memorial for Babi Yar victims inaugurated in Ukraine,” AP, (October 6, 2021).

FRANKLIN A READER

 
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
New York: Library of America 1990, 13-14


    ...From a Child, I was fond of Reading, and all the little Money that came into my Hands was ever laid out in Books. Pleased with the Pilgrim’s Progress, my first Collection was of John Bunyan’s Works, in separate little Volumes. I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton’s Historical Collections; they were small Chapman’s Books and cheap, 40 or 50 in all.—My Father’s little Library consisted chiefly of Books in polemic Divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted, that at a time when I had such a Thirst for Knowledge, more proper Books had not fallen in my Way, since it was now resolv’d I should not be a Clergyman. Plutarch’s Lives there was, in which I read abundantly, and I still think that time was spent to great Advantage. There was also a Book of Defoe’s called an Essay on Projects and another of Dr Mather’s call’d Essays to do Good, which perhaps gave me a Turn of Thinking that had an Influence on some of the principal Events of my Life.

    This Bookish inclination at length determin’d my Father to make me a Printer, tho’ he had already one Son, (James) of that Profession. In 1717 my Brother James return’d from England with a Press & Letters to set up his Business in Boston. I lik’d it much better than that of my Father, but still had a Hankering for the Sea.—To prevent the apprehended Effect of such an Inclination, my Father was impatient to have me bound to my Brother. I stood out some time, but at last was persuaded and signed the Indentures, when I was yet but 12 Years old.—I was to serve as an Apprentice till I was 21 Years of Age, only I was to be allow’d Journeyman’s Wages during the last Year. In a little time I made great Proficiency in the Business, and became a useful Hand to my Brother. I now had Access to better Books. An Acquaintance with the Apprentices of Booksellers, enabled me sometimes to borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon & clean. Often I sat up in my Room reading the greatest Part of the Night, when the Book was borrow’d in the Evening & to be return’d early in the Morning lest it should be miss’d or wanted.—And after some time an ingenious Tradesman who had a pretty Collection of Books, who frequented our Printing House, took Notice of me, invited me to his Library, & very kindly lent me such Books as I chose to read.

READING

  “. . . how the hell did this child get to the 10th grade and they can’t read?”

Joanne Jacob
9 October 2023

Rosalinda wants to be an astronaut, but she doesn’t read very well.

Massachusetts, which claims to have the best public schools in the nation, is “failing its neediest learners,” write Mandy McLaren and Naomi Martin in the Boston Globe. “Before the pandemic, only about half of public school third-graders had adequate reading skills.” Now it’s even worse.

“Scores for all third-graders have slipped below the 50 percent mark, and the most vulnerable kids are in serious trouble; 75 percent of low-income third-graders could not pass the reading comprehension test on last spring’s MCAS exam,” they write. That includes “70 percent of Black third-graders, 80 percent of Latino students, and 85 percent of children with disabilities.”

Rosalinda, a fifth-grader in Lowell, wants to be an astronaut when she grows up, but she reads well below grade level. Teachers told her mother, Maritza Alvarado, who works as a chef, not to worry because Rosalinda doesn’t have a learning disability. But she’s not catching up. Most children who don’t master reading by third grade will continue to struggle.

“. . . how the hell did this child get to the 10th grade and they can’t read?”—Cambridge high school teacher Lily Rayman-Read.

In 2010, Harvard published a report that warned of a “cycle of academic failure” if Massachusetts did not get better at teaching kids to read, write McLaren and Martin. A panel named to study the issue issued five reports in 2019. The recommendations were not followed. “Teachers unions oppose state mandates on curriculum choices.”

Massachusetts, the “birthplace of public education,” lets schools do their own thing. Some schools “use instructional methods grounded in the science of how children learn to read, an approach which teaches kids to sound out words phonetically rather than guess, and helps them build a store of knowledge about the world early on, instead of skipping from topic to topic.” But nearly half use less-effective “balanced literacy” methods and low-quality curriculum.

“Poor children learning to read are now slightly better off going to school in Florida or Mississippi—states that got serious about early literacy years ago—than they are in Massachusetts,” they write.

Nine-year-old Isaac Osorio wants to read bigger books, books with longer sentences and harder words. But he’s stuck, unable to move on from beginner texts, whose pictures and predictable word patterns help signal what the jumbles of letters he sees on the page say.

“Winter is here,” he read one recent evening, opening a picture book to a page he’d memorized. “Sleep, bear, sleep. Winter is here. Sleep, snake, sleep.”

As a “balanced literacy” teacher, Marci Amorim adorned her classroom walls “with colorful posters of Skippy the Frog, who encouraged young readers to skip words they didn’t know, and Eagle Eye, who nudged kids to make a guess based on the pictures they saw,” McLaren and Martin write. When students didn’t learn, the Randolph teacher assumed it was their fault. “We’d say, ‘Poor little Timmy is just low [in reading]. We’ve tried all these things, but he’s just not reading. He’s just always going to be low and struggling.’ And no. We just weren’t teaching little Timmy how he needed to be taught.”

The story is the first in a series on the literacy crisis.

READING

READING 

What all of them had was, in the first place, reading.

For people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all—as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself, the greatest of historians, who did attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which, (as he tells us) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. 

We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds—except in special fields—as their Bachelored, and Mastered, and Doctored acquaintances. 

No doubt these were naturally inclined that way, or else brought up in circumstances where it was taken for granted. And, of course, they must have had some sort of preuniversity education that puts them above many university entrants, or exiters, these days. I think of such people (at random) as Julian Symons, or Roy Fuller, or V.S. Pritchett, or Iain Hamilton, the editor of the London Spectator (who left school at sixteen to work in a clothes shop), and of other major figures in literature and journalism.



All this is relevant, too, to the proliferation of business and management studies by which, in principle at least, a new business class emerges trained in all the expertise but deficient in education proper. When Leland Stanford, himself an outstandingly successful businessman, founded the university that bears his son’s name, he commented that the humanities (then) were important “for the enlargement of the mind and  for business capacity. I think I have noticed that technically educated boys do not make the best businessmen. The imagination needs to be cultivated and developed to ensure success in life.”



Robert Conquest
, Reflections on a Ravaged Century
. New York: Norton and Company, 2000; 228-229



INDIAN ORATORS

         There was a class of men among the Iroquois always put forward on public occasions to speak the mind of the nation or defend its interests. Nearly all of them were of the number of the subordinate chiefs. Nature and training had fitted them for public speaking, and they were deeply versed in the history and traditions of the league. They were in fact professed orators, high in honor and influence among the people. To a huge stock of conventional metaphors, the use of which required nothing but practice, they often added an astute intellect, an astonishing memory, and an eloquence which deserved the name.

        In one particular, the training of these savage politicians was never surpassed. They had no art of writing to record events, or preserve the stipulations of treaties. Memory, therefore, was tasked to the utmost, and developed to an extraordinary degree. They had various devices for aiding it, such as bundles of sticks, and that system of signs, emblems, and rude pictures, which they shared with other tribes. Their famous wampum-belts were so many mnemonic signs, each standing for some act, speech, treaty, or clause of a treaty. These represented the public archives, and were divided among various custodians, each charged with the memory and interpretation of those assigned to him. The meaning of the belts was from time to time expounded in their councils. In conferences with them, nothing more astonished the French, Dutch, and English officials than the precision with which, before replying to their addresses, the Indian orators repeated them point by point.

Francis Parkman, Boston, 1 January 1865
Pioneers of France in the New World
Boston: Little Brown, and Company, 1909, 378-379

GERMAN UNWISDOM

        To create the unfavourable conditions for herself in which Germany afterwards brought about the war, many acts of supreme unwisdom on the part of her rulers were nevertheless still necessary. France must be kept in a state of continued apprehension. The Russian nation, not the Russian Court alone, must be stung by some violent affront inflicted in their hour of weakness. The slow, deep, restrained antagonism of the British Empire must be roused by the continuous and repeated challenge to the sea power by which it lived. Then and then only could those conditions be created under which Germany by an act of aggression would bring into being against her, a combination strong enough to resist and ultimately to overcome her might. 

       There was still a long road to travel before the Vials of Wrath were full. For ten years we were to journey anxiously along that road. It was for a time the fashion to write as if the British Government during these ten years were either entirely unconscious of the approaching danger or had a load of secret matters and deep forebodings on their minds hidden altogether from the thoughtless nation. In fact, however, neither of these alternatives, taken separately, was true; and there is a measure of truth in both of them taken together.

    The British Government and the Parliament out of which it sprang, did not believe in the approach of a great war, and were determined to prevent it; but at the same time the sinister hypothesis was continually present in their thoughts, and was repeatedly brought to the attention of Ministers by disquieting incidents and tendencies.

    During the whole of those ten years this duality and discordance were the keynote of British politics; and those whose duty it was to watch over the safety of the country lived simultaneously in two different worlds of thought. There was the actual visible world with its peaceful activities and cosmopolitan aims; and there was a hypothetical world, a world ‘beneath the threshold,’ as it were, a world at one moment utterly fantastic, at the next seeming about to leap into reality—a world of monstrous shadows moving in convulsive combinations through vistas of fathomless catastrophe.

Winston S. Churchill, (2013-09-23). The World Crisis, Vol. 1 (Winston Churchill's World Crisis Collection) (Kindle Locations 389-404). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition.