When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by Gal Beckerman Read Free Book Online

sat. David Ben-Gurion had envisioned a trial that would be both cathartic for the Jewish people and useful in making a case for Israel's existence. This is why he balked at the idea of trying Eichmann in an international court. He wanted more than justice; he wanted theater. He wanted the world to appreciate the Jewish tragedy.
    When Moscow eventually memorialized the immense suffering of the war, it did so by referring to the trials of "Soviet citizens." No mention was made of the unique fate reserved for the Jews as a people—their loss was subsumed into the twenty million killed in the course of the "Great Patriotic War." But even the Soviets could not ignore the history dredged up by the Eichmann trial, most notably what happened at Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev where the Nazis had shot thirty-four thousand people and buried them in a mass grave. On September 19, 1961, the Soviets experienced the first stirrings of this new Holocaust consciousness. That week's issue of
Literaturnaya Gazeta,
the extremely popular and influential cultural and political newspaper started by Pushkin in 1830, contained a poem by up-and-coming young writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Its title was "Babi Yar." After making a visit to the ravine and seeing that it had been turned into a garbage dump, Yevtushenko wrote a lament not only for the fact that "No monument stands over Babi Yar," as the poem opens, but also for the history of anti-Semitism in his country. He invokes Dreyfus and Anne Frank; he imagines himself the victim of a pogrom; and he condemns the reflexive anti-Semitism of his compatriots as being un-Russian. As the poem reaches its crescendo, the non-Jewish poet identifies himself completely with Jewish suffering. For Yevtushenko, redemption for the Soviet Union was possible only with the elimination of all anti-Semitism:
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!

The "Internationale," let it

thunder

when the last antisemite on earth

is buried forever.
    The poem had incredible resonance.
Literaturnaya Gazeta
immediately sold out of the issue containing it. Thousands of students gathered to hear Yevtushenko read "Babi Yar," then stamped their feet and yelled for him to read it again. The strongest proof of the poem's power was the ferocity with which the government tried to squelch it. The papers were filled with denunciations and counter-poems commissioned by the Soviet authorities. They claimed that Yevtushenko's work demeaned the memory of the millions of other Soviet soldiers and civilians who had fallen in World War II. But even Khrushchev's scolding that "this poem does not belong here" could not stop its spreading influence. In April of 1962, Yevtushenko was on the cover of
Time
magazine. That year, Dimitri Shostakovich, the famed Soviet composer who had only recently joined the Communist Party, set the poem to the music that became his Symphony no. 13 in B-flat Minor, opus 113, known simply as "Babi Yar." On the evening of December 18, 1962, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra first performed the piece, but only after Shostakovich had been forced to change some of the poem's words.

    In Riga, the Soviets reluctantly answered the demand for commemoration by holding an official ceremony in the Bikerniki woods, another place outside town where Nazis had brought prisoners to be executed. A few of the lone Zionists attending hoped to hear mention of the fact that most of these prisoners were Jews. But they heard nothing. The murdered were simply referred to as the victims of Fascism. On that day in October of 1962, the Jews at the ceremony, many of whose families had perished in the war, made a decision to find the place where most of the Jews of Riga had been killed. By the following Sunday, they were at Rumbuli, where the remnants of the mass killing were still evident.