The notices appeared on the walls of Kyiv on September 28th, 1941.

They were printed in three languages — German, Russian, Ukrainian — and their tone was administrative, stripped of the specific quality that might have told the people reading them what the words actually meant. Jewish residents of the city were instructed to report to the corner of Melnikova and Dokhturov Streets the following morning at eight o’clock, bringing documents, money, and warm clothing. The phrasing implied relocation. The German occupation had been in place for less than a week. Nobody yet had a complete vocabulary for what the occupation would require of them.

Some people in Kyiv did not believe the notices.

Some people believed them and came anyway, because not coming, in a city under military occupation, carried its own dangers.

Some people came because they had nowhere else to go, no money for bribes, no non-Jewish neighbors willing to hide them, no route out of a city that had been sealed.

They gathered at the appointed street corner in the morning — families, mostly, the kind of crowd that assembles when a population is told to move and has no reason yet to understand that movement and death have been made synonymous. They brought luggage. They brought documents. They brought children who held the hands of adults who did not know, or knew and could not say, where the road was going.

The road went to Babi Yar.

Babi Yar — the name means Old Woman’s Ravine in Ukrainian — was a geological feature on the northwestern edge of the city, a deep natural gully carved over centuries by erosion, its walls steep and sandy, its floor invisible from the road above. It was unremarkable in the way of landscape features that exist without human significance until human beings give them one. On September 29th and 30th, 1941, human beings gave it one. The Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing units that followed the German Army into occupied Soviet territory — and their Ukrainian auxiliary forces moved 33,771 people to the edge of that ravine and shot them.

Thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and seventy-one people.

In two days.

The arithmetic is specific because the Germans kept records. They noted the number with the flat precision of an accounting entry, as though the number were a quantity of something other than human beings — as though recording it accurately were the relevant form of care. The records survived the war. The number is not disputed.

What the records cannot contain is the texture of those two days.

The walk from the city. The sound of the crowd — tens of thousands of people moving through the morning, the shuffling and the crying and the confusion, children asking questions that adults answered in whatever words were available. The moment when the road narrowed toward the ravine and the nature of what was happening became clear, when the luggage was taken, when families were separated into groups, when the specific bureaucratic machinery of mass murder made itself visible for what it was.

There were people who tried to run. There were people who could not run — the elderly, the sick, the very young. There were parents who stayed with their children because leaving was unthinkable. There were people who had believed, until the last possible moment, that the notice on the wall had meant what its language implied.

The shooting took two days.

By the evening of September 30th, the ravine held 33,771 people who had been residents of Kyiv that morning.

The German command noted the completion of the operation in the same administrative register in which it had been planned.

And then, for years, the silence.

The Soviet Union recaptured Kyiv in 1943. The war ended in 1945. The Soviet government, in the postwar years, developed a specific policy regarding what had happened at Babi Yar — a policy that could be described, in its most charitable interpretation, as the subordination of particular suffering to a unified narrative of Soviet wartime heroism, and that can also be described, less charitably, as the deliberate suppression of the specific Jewish identity of the victims in favor of a generic accounting that dissolved them into the broader category of Soviet citizens killed by fascism.

A housing development was proposed for the site.

In 1959 and 1960, construction began on a dam upstream designed to contain industrial waste from nearby factories. The dam held mud and tailings and the byproducts of Soviet industrial output, and it held them imperfectly, and on the morning of March 13th, 1961, the dam failed. A wave of mud moved through the ravine at speed, into the neighborhood below, killing more than a hundred people in their homes and on the streets and burying an unknown additional number in debris that took months to clear. The site of a massacre became the site of a secondary disaster, and the official response to both was characterized by the same quality: the effort to minimize, to manage, to prevent the place from becoming what it had earned the right to become.

There was no memorial at Babi Yar.

In September 1961, a twenty-eight-year-old Soviet poet named Yevgeny Yevtushenko went to the ravine and stood at the edge of it.

He had heard about the massacre. He had heard about the suppression. He had read the official silence and understood it as a choice — not the absence of something but the presence of something, a decision made by people who found the specific memory of Babi Yar inconvenient for reasons that said more about them than about the dead.

He wrote a poem.

It began: There are no memorials at Babi Yar.

In thirty-one lines it named what had happened and named the silence around it and named the specific people the silence was designed to erase — Jewish men and women and children who had walked to the ravine on a September morning carrying luggage and documents and the ordinary trust of people who do not yet understand that trust has been weaponized against them.

The poem was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta in September 1961.

The response from Soviet cultural authorities was swift. The poem was condemned. Yevtushenko was criticized in the official press for nationalist sentiment, for distorting the character of the Soviet people, for a variety of offenses that translated, in their substance, to a single offense: he had said clearly what the authorities preferred to leave unsaid.

The poem circulated anyway. Hand to hand, copied and recopied, the way things travel in systems designed to stop their travel. Dmitri Shostakovich set it to music as the first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony. The symphony was performed once in Moscow in December 1962, and then the conductor was pressured, and the soloists were pressured, and subsequent performances were canceled, and the symphony was effectively suppressed for years.

The silence held, officially.

It did not hold everywhere.

A memorial was finally erected at Babi Yar in 1976 — thirty-five years after the massacre, and even then a generic one, commemorating Soviet citizens rather than specifically Jewish victims. A menorah was added in 1991, when Ukraine became independent. A more comprehensive memorial has been under development for years, its completion interrupted by the kinds of complications that attend the building of memorials in places where history remains contested and the living have not finished arguing about what the dead deserve.

In February 2022, a Russian missile struck near the Babi Yar memorial complex.

The ravine that had held the bodies of 33,771 people for eighty years absorbed a new impact, and the world noted it, and the work of memory continued in the way that the work of memory always continues — imperfectly, incompletely, against resistance, because the alternative is to allow the silence to win.

The silence does not win.

Not at Babi Yar. Not anywhere that people have decided, against institutional pressure and official indifference and the simple human tendency to look away from unbearable things, that the names behind the numbers deserve to be said.

Thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and seventy-one people walked to the edge of a ravine in Kyiv on two days in September 1941.

They had names.

They had families, and work, and the ordinary interior lives of people going about the business of being alive — the arguments and the meals and the small private joys that do not survive into the historical record but that constituted, for each of them, the actual substance of existence.

They had futures that were taken from them on a Tuesday and a Wednesday in September, in a city they had lived in their whole lives, by people who had decided that the categories into which they had sorted the world justified what was done at the bottom of that ravine.

To remember them is not nostalgia.

It is not sentiment.

It is the specific act of insisting that the people who were reduced to a number in a German administrative record were not, in fact, a number — that they were each a life of the full weight and complexity that a life carries, that their erasure was not a natural event but a choice made by human beings, and that the choice is worth examining, and naming, and refusing to forget, because the conditions that produced it are not as remote from the present as comfort would prefer.

Babi Yar is a ravine on the edge of Kyiv.

It is also a question that the twentieth century asked and did not answer, and that the twenty-first century is still being asked, in different languages, in different places, with different names attached to the categories of people being sorted and counted and moved toward edges.

The question is whether the silence will hold.

It has not held before.

It must not hold now.

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Full story · 13 min read · Dante Darkside

“They brought luggage. They brought documents. They came because not coming seemed more dangerous. That detail is everything.” — Reader, Kyiv “The poem circulated hand to hand in a system designed to stop it. Some things refuse to stay buried.” — Reader, Warsaw “A missile struck near the memorial in 2022. The ravine absorbed a new impact. The work of memory continued.” — Reader, London “Thirty-three thousand seven hundred and seventy-one. The Germans kept records. The number is not disputed. I need a moment.” — Reader, Berlin “To remember them is not nostalgia. It is the specific act of insisting they were not a number. Yes.” — Reader, New York NY