By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — The soil in Kiev is fertile. It is rich in humus, thanks to which Kiev has abundant vegetation and beautiful nature. But Kiev’s soil also witnessed the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust in Ukraine: during the Nazi occupation, more than 50,000 Jews were executed in Babi Yar. Over two days, September 29–30, 1941, 33,771 Jews were killed. On October 1, 2, 8, and 11, another 17,000 Jews were shot.
The soil in Kiev’s Babi Yar ravine was particularly fertile. Everything that nature desired grew there. Since the days of Kievan Rus, the women of Kiev had seen their husbands off to war there. Hence the name: Babi Yar (ravine of women, “baba” in Russian). Tears of grief mingled with the waters of the overflowing Dnieper. There was plenty of moisture in Babi Yar. A paradise for everything that grew, and grief for the Jews who wanted to live. The Nazis chose the largest ravine in Kiev as the place of execution for Jews.
The tragedy of Babi Yar lies on the conscience of the leaders of the USSR: many Kiev Jews remained in the Nazi-occupied city because the authorities hid from them the persecution of Jews by the Nazis in occupied Poland. The silencing of the Holocaust in the USSR refers to the deliberate concealment of information about the persecution of the Jewish population in the territories of the USSR occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II. This silencing began in 1939 during the political rapprochement between the USSR and Germany after they signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and lasted from the moment Germany attacked Poland until June 22, 1941, when the Nazis attacked the USSR.
In 1939, there were 224,236 Jews living in Kiev, making up 26.5 percent of the city’s population. About a quarter of them, around 50,000, did not evacuate but remained in the city, trusting the Soviet authorities. The Jews of Kiev who did not leave and were exterminated by the Nazis died because of the deceitful policy of the Soviet authorities, who claimed that Jews were Soviet people, that they were being killed like all Soviet people, and that therefore there was no special Jewish problem. The silencing of the Holocaust during and after World War II and the refusal to erect monuments to the murdered Jews are a form of complicity in it.
After the war, Kiev was rebuilt, constructed, and grew. Brick factories were built. Kiev became a large construction site. Local brick factories dumped their waste, which was diluted with water, into Babi Yar. The ravine gradually filled with slurry, a mixture of sand, clay, and water. The population of Kiev grew. The residential area of Kurenevka was located near Babi Yar. Babi Yar was 65 meters above Kurenevka. The Kiev authorities built an earthen dam to separate the millions of tons of slurry accumulating in the ravine from the residential areas.
On March 13, 1961, at 8:30 a.m., four million cubic meters of slurry, which had been dumped into Babi Yar for more than 10 years, broke through a small embankment dam and flooded the low-lying area of Kurenevka. An avalanche of wet soil about twenty meters wide rolled down the main street of Kurenevka, Frunze Street, sweeping away everything in its path. Waves of dirty sludge up to 14 meters high crashed into Kurenevka at a speed of up to 20 kilometers per hour. People were flooded in their homes, trams, and buses. They were buried alive in a matter of minutes under a three-meter layer of liquid mud. Thirty hectares of Kurenevka Square were flooded with liquid mud. The mudslide destroyed 68 residential and 13 administrative buildings, as well as destroying about 300 apartments and houses.
The tragedy was hushed up. The authorities destroyed all investigation documents, banned mass funerals, and did not write the exact date of death on cemetery monuments in order to hide the mass deaths on the same day. Complainants were arrested. Bodies were found for a whole month. According to historians’ estimates, approximately 1,500 people died in Kurenevka. At that time, 1.5 million people lived in Kiev. In percentage terms, the tragedy in Kiev was much worse than the tragedy in New York, where two giant buildings were destroyed by terrorists in 2001.
On April 12, 1961, the first man, Yuri Gagarin, was launched into space.The whole country celebrated. The Kiev authorities did everything they could to distract the suffering population from their grief and anxiety by proclaiming the empire’s extraordinary successes. Rumors spread that the murdered Jews had taken revenge on Kiev. It was “revenge” for complicity in the murder, for not burying them and not erecting a monument. The brutally murdered, unburied Jews, whose execution was concealed by the Nazis and Communists, rose up against the desecration of their memory.
After the Kurenevka tragedy and its concealment from Soviet citizens, a joyful song was written in 1962, glorifying Kiev and its nature, which became the anthem of Kiev in 2014. This song, “How can I not love you, my Kiev!” was written to the music of the Ukrainian Jewish composer Igor (Isaiah Naumovich) Shamo, with lyrics by Ukrainian poet Dmitry Lutsenko, and was first performed on May 27, 1962, by Russian singer Yuri Gulyayev, accompanied by the Kiev Opera Theater orchestra conducted by Jewish conductor Zakhar Kozharsky and Jewish violinist Abram Stern.
Composer Shamo, his fellow tribesmen Kozharsky and Stern immersed themselves in love for Kiev. The anthem of Kiev was played in the city where tens of thousands of Jews were executed, left nameless and unmourned. Perhaps this anthem was one of the means of concealing the sacrilege. In Kiev, where more than 50,000 Jews were executed and left unburied, a song of love for the city was performed, a new “ode to joy,” similar to the one written by Friedrich Schiller and set to music in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Among the composers and first performers of Kiev’ “Ode to Joy” were Jews whose executed tribesmen remained forgotten.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 11 books.