There isn’t much left at Babi Yar. The Soviets bulldozed the place after the war, and then there was a massive mudslide there in the early 60’s. The memorial erected in the late 80’s is gruesome, and very Soviet. Something about unity, and trying to forget how Ukrainians collaborated with the invading Germans.
The ravine isn’t deep. The tree growth is relatively new, still stragglers that bend sideways and the bushes aren’t so dense I couldn’t have gone into the ravine. To see what it looked like from the bottom. To see, I suppose, what I would have seen, if I had been one of my relatives who died there. What it looked like, if I had been a body, under bodies, over bodies, staring at the vivid blue of the Ukrainian sky.
Most people don’t know about Babi Yar. But you should. Babi Yar is the single biggest massacre of the Holocaust. There was an order posted saying that all Jews in Kiev, Ukraine must report to this place for resettlement. It’d been a generation since the pogroms and the Kievan Jews trusted the pamphlets. They all showed up, exactly as they were told. They were stripped of their belongings. They were stripped of their clothing. They were driven in groups of ten down to the ravine. And then they were lined up next to a ravine. It happened so fast. They didn’t know what was happening at first. But then they were shot. Sometimes, they were gunned down so fast they didn’t have time to try and run, though they couldn’t have escaped. Sometimes. Sometimes, they were forced to lie down on the bodies of those who had died before them. And then. One. By. One. They were shot. Their bodies filled the ravine. They didn’t always die from the shot. Sometimes, they suffocated from the weight of the next body to land on them. 33, 771 Ukrainian Jews were murdered in two days in 1941, so early in the war, the same month as the first extermination of prisoners at Auschwitz. 33,771 Ukrainian Jews, plus thousands of Roma and other Nazi targets, were murdered in a ravine in Kiev, Ukraine. Only about 3,000 names are known.
One person cannot memorize every name of every Holocaust victim. Not even from one group. So many people died. I think that’s why we say we can never forget, because it literally takes all of us, the so few we have left, to remember the names we know.
My friend Yana grew up in Ukraine during the Soviet Union. Her friends’ papers said Ukrainian. Her papers said Jew. She grew up right across the street from Babi Yar. She didn’t know. She never knew. Her family left immediately in 1991 and she grew up here in the States. The synagogue in Kiev was at times a theatre and a stable during the Soviet era. She did not grow up hearing Jewish prayers. But she is still Jewish. She is Jewish, she survived an anti-Semitic state, and she played in a park where her relatives were murdered.
To walk in Europe as a Jew is to walk on your people’s graves.
When I wrote about Kate Breslin’s book For Such a Time, I didn’t expect the controversy to get so large. I didn’t expect it to be covered in mainstream media. I didn’t expect anyone to care. Because generally, and all marginalized communities know what I’m talking about, these things are a fury on the internet for a few days, and they burn out. I think we’ve been loud, and that’s given this an extended life. But there’s a reason we’ve been loud.
We’ve been here before. Jen Rothschild blogged about that here. You should read it.
When I look at the cover of For Such a Time, this is what I see: A line of Jewish people on their way to their deaths. And this is where my heart breaks. Because when I look at the cover, I think those could be my relatives. And I would never know because they are all dead.
I stepped away last week because it became too much. I was tired of having well meaning people @-ing me on Twitter, or emailing me to say I should research gas chambers because “there’s a battle about if they were actually used or not.” Or how “The only people who understood the impact of the war like the Germans were the Jews.” Or “My grandmother was there but she really didn’t know! They kept everyone in the dark!”
Those are real things said to me. Sent to me. In the written word. By people who would never consider themselves anti-Semitic. That’s besides the flat-out Holocaust denial that I received before I shut down the anonymous Ask part of my Tumblr.
I don’t need to research the Holocaust, because I have. I don’t want to hear about gas chambers because even reading the word makes me panic and feel like I don’t have enough air to breathe.
Like I am in a gas chamber myself.
I don’t want to hear about the Good German complex, and India Valentin broke that down so well here in a series of tweets.
I want to be heard. And I have been. I want people to think critically about the microaggressions they say to the Jewish people in their life, and the ones they say behind the backs of Jews, in front of others, perpetuating the dangerous and violent pulse beneath our entire culture. The one that makes us American Jews, the ones who have lived here our entire lives, fear being listed together even in a tweet. The one that makes us think don’t make us easier to find.
Because we fear, even now, today, that one day, it’ll happen again. Here. And history has proven to us again, and again, and again, that we can say never again, and we can say never forget, but we Jews are the only ones saying that. When you erase the Holocaust, you erase me. You say that my life is meaningless. You say, you are only an object. You are just a character in a story that we tell about bad boogey men who lived over there and back then and don’t live now. When you erase the Holocaust, you say, Jewish people had it coming. Like anyone asks for slow, torturous murders. Like anyone asks for their children to become medical experiments. Like anyone asks to become an anonymous grave in their own neighborhood, their bodies dug up, burnt, sent up in smoke, and their entire existence erased from the earth. Like anyone asks to die under the weight of their naked parents’ bodies on top of them.
When you look at a Jew with my hair color and eye color and say, You would have survived the Holocaust, you erase the millions of blonde-blue-eyed Jews who died, who survived. Whose coloring didn’t matter because they were Jewish. You oversimplify the Nazi philosophy. It wasn’t just our looks that were unsuitable for life on the planet, it was all of us. It was our genes. It was our parents. It was our history. It was every atom in our body.
When you laugh and suggest that I’m being cheap because I am Jewish, you are perpetuating the stereotypes that led to each instance of violent anti-Semitism that ended in massacres and genocides.
When you look at a book like For Such a Time and think it lifts up Jews, that that is the story we should be telling from the Holocaust, you not only erase—like the Nazis did—the memories of the victims, you erase the memories of the survivors. The ones who went looking for their families and found no one. The ones who found their spouses, but not their children. The ones who went home, to the neighborhoods where their neighbors turned them in, and found families living in their old houses. The ones who immigrated. The ones who forged ahead. The ones who died after the War ended because they were just too sick to get better. The ones who whispered to my grandfather in Yiddish at the gates of Dachau.
Kate Breslin’s statement, her publisher’s statement and RWA’s statement are acts of erasure.
We will not be erased.
We will continue to talk about this because we’ve been silent about anti-Semitism in this country for too long. Because we thought assimilation might save us now. Because we hoped that if no one noticed we were Jewish, we could escape death next time. Because we moved and created communities of all Jewish people because we are only ever safest in communities of our own and that makes you uncomfortable. It should. It means that you’ve done a terrible job at making America the dream it’s supposed to be.
My name is Katherine Locke. You erased my history. I will not be silent.