"No monument stands over Babi Yar / A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone." These daring words open Yevgeni Yevtushenko's 1961 poem, Babi Yar, condemning what happened in the ravine of death northwest of Kiev and lamenting the abyss of silence.
On 28 September 1941, nine days after the Germans conquered Kiev, the Nazis ordered every Jew in the city to convene with their belongings and documents near the cemetery at the edge of Babi Yar. Any Jew who refused would be killed, the announcement read, which led to the belief that the reason for convening would be mass deportation. The following day the Jews arrived at the entrance to the Babi Yar ravine, were ordered to remove their clothes and were shot en masse into the ravine. 33,771 of Kiev's Jews were killed on the 29th and 30th of that month. Throughout that year an additional 15,000 were killed in a similar fashion. In total, over the course of several waves of murder, more than 100,000 people were killed over two years. Among those were 50,000 Jews, the others being gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, prisoners of war, and citizens accused of rioting.
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It is a known fact that Ukrainians took part in the massacre. The scope of the horror and the sound of the firing rounds shook even the most evil of men, wrote Anatoly Kuznetsov in his historic novel "Babi Yar" (1968), where one of the only survivors of the massacre told her horrific story. Even when the lines are read, one struggles to believe it. The atrocity was seen only by getting closer to the ravine, she said, and she relates how she saw with her own eyes how the hairs of those ordered to take their clothes off quickly turned gray before being sent to their death.
Babi Yar is not only a site of destruction and extermination, it is a ravine of silencing and obliviousness. A task no less "elaborate" than the massacre was covering up its traces, a disgusting job given to hundreds of prisoners, some of them Jews. The covering up was successful and there was no memory of the mass graves at Babi Yar, as after the war the site was not seen as a place where a massacre occurred, and no memorial was built for the murdered. The mudslide that happened in 1961 further warped the ground. One million and half-Jews were slaughtered in Ukraine during the Holocaust, and not one museum was ever built in the area.
But no longer. Now the consciousness demands memory. A massive Holocaust center is set to be built in Babi Yar - the Babyn Yar Holocaust Center. Unlike most Holocaust museums, which were built when the memory of the tragic events was still fresh, the museum in Babi Yar commemorates events that happened 80 years ago during an almost lost generation. The museum is intended mainly for those born at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, and is a solitary museum built on the extermination site itself.
Nathan Sharansky, chairman of the advisory committee for the center establishment fund, says: "Babi Yar for me was a symbol not only for the Holocaust but also for the great efforts the Soviet regime went to in order to erase its memory. To erase the Jewish identity of the place. After Ukraine gained independence, there were a few attempts to build a significant monument, but these failed due to financial and bureaucratic reasons. At the end of 2015, the formation of a serious group on the issue began, with the support of a few respectable philanthropists. I felt it was becoming a possibility and got very excited."
In 2016, the foundation for Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was established, which set itself numerous goals: commemoration of the victims and memorializing the people and events that were erased by the Soviet regime; present the story of relations between Jews and non-Jews in Ukraine; research of Holocaust crimes in the former Soviet and Eastern Europe region; develop an educational platform to discuss the Holocaust specifically, human rights in general, and the dangers of racist and extremist ideologies.
The center is not governmental but works in cooperation with government officials. Other members on the advisory board are: former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer; Leonid Makarovych Kravchuk, the first president of Ukraine; US Senator Joe Lieberman; and former Polish president, Aleksander Kwaśniewski. The budget for the massive project is 100 million dollars. The CEO of the project is Max Yakover, and the artistic direction is in the hands of Ilya Khrzhanovsky, with whom I wanted to speak.
Khrzhanovsky, 45, is a fascinating cinema director who has won many awards, whose films have been shown in international festivals around the world. Ilya has created many projects, the most extravagant of them being "Dau" – a daring experimental project, a colossal multimedia exhibit, and a series of films that were widely successful.
"Dau" is a multidisciplinary, dynamic epic that combines science, art, spirituality, literature, and architecture. Its creation lasted over a decade. In a deserted swimming pool in Ukraine, Khrzhanovsky established the "Institute of Physics and Technology", an experimental research facility, or a massive social experiment, or an instructive art project. The site was filled with hundreds of participants: scientists, artists, doctors – all in completely detached from their daily lives, disconnected from time and space. A complete universe created with its own schools, cafes, full of people who create, experience, and forge relationships in replicated copies from a Soviet life under totalitarian influence. This real-legend drama produced hundreds of hours of filmed materials that became unusual trans-media products. It's fascinating to see how Khrzhanovsky the artist connects to Babi Yar.
Q: Tell me about your personal background and the Jewish point in your life.
"I was born and raised in the USSR during Soviet rule. My mother is Jewish and was born in Ukraine. During the Second World War her family escaped to Uzbekistan. In the early 1960s she moved to Moscow and there met my father, a Moscow native. My grandmother from my father's side was also Jewish.
"I'm an only child born to elderly parents, who were very connected to me, my friends were basically my parents' friends, some of whom were even older than my parents. And that was complete bliss because they were excellent and special people. I grew up in an environment of the Russian intelligentsia, with a wide circle of friends, regardless of their ethnic background, people of culture, authors, scientists, intellectuals. Thanks to this biography, my conception of time was different. These people told me of their experiences from 70 years ago, and that's how the distant memories became closer for me. Through my life I witnessed three different realities: a reality of hopelessness and uselessness during the Soviet regime; afterwards there was this hope that a new and wonderful society would be built with free borders and the ability to move from place to place; up until the point where people became permanent subjects, that same reality that exists today."
Q: Where do you now live?
"I live everywhere and nowhere. At the moment I live in Moscow. I basically live in the place that I work in."
Q: How does a daring and provocative artist like you connect with such a heavy topic?
"It's an unexpected and important turn in my life. For the past decade, I had lived in London. A year ago I thought to myself, how can my life grow and develop. Simultaneously I visited Israel a lot. My parents spent lengthy periods of time here, too. I felt Israel was close to me; a year ago we made Aliyah and got Israeli citizenship. From that moment on I felt that I wanted to do something for Israel, I strangely felt that Israel was my homeland.
"Surprisingly, two weeks after getting my citizenship, my friend, businessman and philanthropist Michael Friedman, told me about the project that he and other donors were involved in. He asked me to join the council and review the project, not as just another standard museum. I met with the donors. I tried to find a unique language to tell the story of the Holocaust relevant to people of today, and more importantly, people of the future. Every culture creates a language suitable for its time and understandable for its time. At any given time, people experience reality through language, and that changes reality. In Babi Yar we need new language and expression, so that young people can experience the content.
"I presented the board of trustees a variety of up to date technologies (3D, VR, etc.) and a variety of styles and narratives through which the story can be told. I asked to give me a year to develop the language and concept, and I was offered to be the artistic director of the project. That's when I understood what I can do for Israel and the Jewish people."
Q: You write that two crimes took place at Babi Yar, the massacres themselves, and their disappearing into oblivion afterward. How will you translate that conceptually?
"The inability to remember the past creates the inability to plan or remember the future. We must experience the memory of the Holocaust as something that happens to us in the present. As a constant, bleeding wound for the human race.
"A visitor to Babi Yar will go through two experiences: a general experience of that same destroyed, lost world and an individual experience of every person. Each one of the murdered was born under different circumstances: simple and wise people, poor and rich, different from each other. But they all died the same horrible death that same day.
"The visual, audio, and technological means enable a voyage of physical space suited to each person from every age and background. Each visitor will feel something important about the past and people from the past, but also something significant about themselves and their lives. By forming a collective experience as an individual experience, the past becomes a personal story and then rises as the present."
Death became part of life
Since its establishment, the foundation for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center went through defining stages. Fascinating work in 3D modeling was done for the site, development of architectural vision, focus on the creation of a museum, establishing research institutes, online platforms, and many projects. One of the more important projects inaugurated this year: "Babi Yar the context" – a cooperation with the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, is a documentary film based on material that the public has yet to see; the "Names" project - a first of its kind comprehensive research project in Ukraine, converging all existing sources into one verified database for identifying unknown victims and verifying the names of known ones; creating an electronic library and archive system that will be the biggest source of knowledge on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe; and publishing of historical chronicles and literature.
Q: Can there be a fundamental dimension of "remember" in the age of quickly changing stimuli, in a time of fragmentation?
"Indeed, in many countries there are people living with no memory of the war or knowledge about the Holocaust. If the Holocaust hadn't happened we'd be living in a completely different reality today. Carpenters, poets, scientists disappeared forever. The cosmos they lived in was lost. Their sons were not born. The reality that was destroyed makes Eastern Europe a cripple.
"Before the Second World War, every fourth family in Kiev was Jewish. Imagine how much knowledge, tradition, smells, lessons, books, cultures – disappeared from the mental and emotional picture of the era. The story of Babi Yar is not just about the murder of Jews by Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators, this is a story about a whole universe that was destroyed.
"The coronavirus, as a global pandemic, has shown us that we are not separate and it has influenced the way we see life and death. The pandemic forced people to move from abstract thinking of death to a concrete understanding of it. Today people are beginning to think of death as a part of life. Suddenly they're dealing with death, starting to get prepared for it. This influences their ability to look at tragic events and experience them as part of reality."
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Ilya is one of the most respected directors today in Europe but also controversial. His appointment was criticized widely. It's been said he will turn Babi Yar into theme park; there are fears he will bring to Babi Yar an experience of retraumatization, like in "Dau," yet he refutes these claims:
"The wave of criticism was created intentionally by people in Ukraine who oppose the project. Their claims are baseless. A false opinion of one man becomes reality and I find myself in a witch hunt justifying myself for things I never even did. Moreover, the person who was the previous design advisor and left with his team, is now having a type of counter-reaction with claims against me, ugly rumors, which will soon die out."
Q: When will the museum be ready?
"The platforms of the online museum will be up before the 80th anniversary of the massacre, so that's 2021. The physical museum will open in 2026."
Q: Is there something you'd like to say to the Israeli reader?
"I feel honored and the weight of responsibility to be part of such an important project of remembering the holocaust and the memory of the Jewish people. This is not just a museum commemorating Babi Yar, but everything that happened in Eastern Europe. Therefore all the direct and indirect descendants of the victims of Eastern Europe, and we know many of them live in Israel, will be interested in this museum. I am sure Israelis will have a strong experience concerning that lost world they came from.
"I am proud to feel part of the state of Israel and the people of Israel and hope to come here again soon. For the readers of this newspaper – if you have pictures, stories, or information about Babi Yar or other killing fields in Eastern Europe, please let us know, to help us make a monument and name for your family and the family of the Jewish people."
