“One cannot explain it with words”: the “Holocaust by Bullets”

Documentary novel “Babi Yar” relives the Nazis’ execution of tens of thousands of Jews in 1941

On Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, in a ravine just outside Kyiv called Babyn Yar (“Babi Yar” in Russian), Nazis executed nearly 34,000 Jews over the course of 36 hours. It was the deadliest mass execution in what came to be known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.” We were never supposed to know it happened. In 1943, as the Nazis fled Kyiv, they ordered the bodies in Babyn Yar to be dug up and burned, to erase all memory of what they’d done.

The Nazis planned to kill the workers they tasked with destroying the bodies. “But they didn’t succeed,” one declared proudly. The Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa included newsreel footage in his documentary “Babi Yar. Context” ( 2021) of one of the men giving an interview. He and 12 others ( out of 300) escaped “and can now testify,” he tells the camera, “to the whole world and our motherland to the acts of barbarity committed by those fascist dogs in our beloved Kyiv.”

And yet, not everyone believed the story. In October 1943, the Soviets invited a delegation of American journalists to Babyn Yar, gave them a tour of the ravine and told them of the atrocities that had occurred there. Their reports were bafflingly contradictory. Though hair and bones were mixed in with the dirt under their feet, some of the journalists considered these fragments just that: pieces of some bigger, unclear whole. Others dissented. In a frustrated letter to his parents, Bill Downs ( Newsweek, CBS) concluded: “It seems that the Presbyterian mind of the average American cannot accept the fact that any group of people can coolly sit down and decide to torture thousands of people. … This refusal to believe these facts,” he noted, “is probably the greatest weapon the Nazis have.”

On that September day in 1941, a 12- year- old boy named Anatoly Kuznetsov was in his Kyiv courtyard with his grandfather. They lived a stone’s throw from the ravine and could hear a sound: “ta- ta- ta, ta- ta.” “They’re shooting ’ em,” his grandfather realized. All morning the city had been abuzz with rumor: “Where are they taking them? What are they doing with them?” The city’s Jewish population had been told to report at 8 o’clock, to bring valuables and warm clothing. Many assumed — hoped — this meant deportation. However, others could feel the truth even if they had not seen it yet. Earlier that morning, Kuznetsov recalled, a young girl threw herself from a window. After the war, a witness said he had seen a woman that morning standing in front of her home crying out in Yiddish. He told the war crimes tribunal: “Her entire body expressed such a terror, such extreme despair, that it is hard to imagine such a degree of human suffering. One cannot explain it with words. It cannot be told.”

I cannot say for sure that Kuznetsov believed otherwise. What true artist thinks he can capture something entirely, perfectly? And what reader, not having been there, can say yes — he got it right. All I can say is that over the days I spent reading the notebook young Kuznetsov began keeping about the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, I screamed when a neighbor knocked on my car window. I screamed when my partner came up behind me and asked a question. It was as if I had developed a fear of sound after reading Kuznetsov’s interview with an actress from the Kyiv puppet theater, Dina Mironovna Pronicheva. She had survived by jumping in the ravine before the bullets hit. She landed in a sea of bodies, “was immediately spattered with warm blood,” and all around her were the noises of the halfalive, “strange submerged sounds, groaning, choking and sobbing.”

Kuznetsov turned his notebook into what he labeled “a document in the form of a novel.” Originally published in Russian in 1966, Babi Yar, translated by David Floyd, is now being reissued with an introduction by the journalist Masha Gessen. The book does not read like an account of an event by someone who thinks the worst is over; Kuznetsov writes with a certainty about the future, a sureness that his words will resonate again. Historical comparison is often sneered at. If you want to be mocked on social media, draw parallels between a contemporary event and World War II. Kuznetsov would have no patience for such sneering. “Fate plays with us as it wishes — we are just little microbes crawling about the globe,” Kuznetsov warns. “You could have been me; you could have been born in Kyiv, in Kurenyovka, and I could now have been you, reading this page.”

Kuznetsov employs typeface to tell a story beyond the text itself. Everything in boldface is what Soviet censors excised from his novel, which was first released in installments in the literary journal Yunost ( Youth). There’s one almost humorous moment when the censors’ paws are all over a passage about … censorship. After the Nazis have warned all local households to get rid of Soviet publications, Kuznetsov’s mother tells him: “You have your life ahead of you, Tolya, so just remember that this is the first sign of trouble — if books are banned, that means things are going wrong. It means that you are surrounded by force, fear and ignorance, that power is in the hands of barbarians.” Gessen observes that Kuznetsov “created a layered text that told several stories: the story of the Babyn Yar massacre,” as well as that of “Soviet efforts to suppress this history.” In the Soviet Union and today in Russia, World War II has largely been recast as a story of victory, of wins not losses, of Red Army heroes without nationality. Attempts to specify any of the victims as Jewish were met with charges of “bourgeois nationalism.” In 1944, the Soviet Jewish writers Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, who both covered the war as reporters embedded with the Red Army, attempted to publish a book documenting the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. That volume, “The Black Book of Soviet Jewry,” was banned and members of the Jewish AntiFascist Committee, which helped compile it, were accused of “rootless cosmopolitanism” and executed under Stalin.

In 2016, on the 75th anniversary of the mass execution at Babyn Yar, Petro Poroshenko, then the president of Ukraine, announced plans to establish the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. Though privately funded, the center was seen as part of the Ukrainian government’s efforts to build closer ties to Europe and reject Russia’s legacy of Holocaust suppression. The project has been besieged by creative differences, many stemming from the involvement of the immersive filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky. In 2021, he took Gessen on a tour of one of the exhibits in progress, which Gessen later described as a column of mirrors riddled with bullet holes matching “the caliber of the bullets used by the executioners.” While Khrzhanovsky’s ideas have understandably induced some eye- rolling, his interest in collapsing time, in fusing past and present, feels in sync with Kuznetsov’s microbe theory: “You could have been me,” and “I could now have been you.”

On March 1, 2022, Russia launched a missile at Kyiv, striking a TV tower and a nearby building intended for use as part of the Holocaust memorial. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, wrote, “We all died again at Babyn Yar.” Now, instead of collecting materials related to 1941, the center is working with Zelenskyy’s government to document the atrocities being committed by Vladimir Putin. As Kuznetsov knew even as a small boy, remembering is something we do in the present tense.