Babi Yar: 70 Years

From the BBC:
"Babi Yar massacre: Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko recollects"

It is 70 years since what is believed to be the biggest single massacre of the Holocaust. On 29 and 30 September 1941, the Nazis took almost 34,000 Jews to the edge of the Babi Yar ravine in Ukraine's capital Kiev and shot them all. The horror of what happened was highlighted 20 years later when Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem entitled Babi Yar. He spoke to BBC World Service. I wrote it in August 1961 in the city of Kiev, and - surprisingly - it was published. I met the writer Anatoly Kuznetsov - he was an eyewitness to what happened in Babi Yar. He told me the story, and I asked him to accompany me to the site. I knew there was no monument at Babi Yar, but I was expecting to see some sign of respect.

Babi Yar Poem: "The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar. The trees look ominous, like judges. Here all things scream silently, and, baring my head, Slowly I feel myself turning grey. And I myself am one massive, soundless scream Above the thousand thousand buried here. I am each old man here, shot dead. I am every child here, shot dead. Nothing in me shall ever forget!"

But what I saw was absolutely terrible - there were lots of trucks and they were unloading stinking garbage on the tens of thousands of people who were killed. I did not expect that. As soon as I got back to my hotel, I sat down and I began to write - it took probably four or five hours, no more. When I recited Babi Yar for the first time in public, there was an avalanche of silence. I was absolutely shocked - paralysed. And afterwards a very, very little old woman with grey hair and a cane - her cane had been knocking against the stage - she came to me in the dead silence. She said just one sentence, "I was in Babi Yar." She was one of the survivors who crawled from under the mountain of dead bodies. The poem was a criticism of anti-Semitism worldwide, including Soviet anti-Semitism, and was against all kinds of racism.

^ I visited Babi Yar and came to the same conclusion as Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Today there are several memorials there, but it is still not used as it should be. The guide book I had for Kiev said it was still a "lover's lane." I don't see how it can be romantic to be at a place where 33,000 + people were murdered. It has been 70 years since the massacre happened and 50 since Yevtushenko's poem was written and yet it seems that not much has changed (especially in Russia, Ukraine, etc.) People continue to forget what happened or simply don't care. ^

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15093224