Babi Yar Death Site Moves Bush, Survivors to Tears

Maria Palte was 12 when the Nazis, having overrun Kiev, came for her and her family. A neighbor, Olga Roshinenko, then 17, hid the younger girl in her home.

Palte’s mother, brother and sisters perished in the narrow ravine called Babi Yar. She, and the woman who saved her, survived.

Under gray, cool and rainy skies Thursday, Palte and Roshinenko, now elderly women with graying hair and missing teeth, stood near where Palte’s family was murdered in one of the first mass slaughters of the Holocaust. They saw an American President’s eyes well with tears as he recalled what Nazi storm troopers had done and heard a Communist Party boss quote Thomas Jefferson on the inalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Near them stood 60 children wearing the blue-and-white T-shirts of a Jewish summer camp--a camp run by an American-based Jewish organization as part of an effort to revive religious life among the remnant of what was once one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities.

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 gray.

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!”

Bush read those lines from the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Palte began to cry. Bush’s voice cracked.

“The Holocaust occurred because good men and women averted their eyes from unprecedented evil,” Bush said, fighting against tears. The Babi Yar monument “proves that eventually, the forces of good and of truth will rise in triumph. No matter how bleak our lives may seem, this fact should comfort us.”

“We’re very thankful,” said Palte. “Bush, he has a good heart.”

On Sept. 29, 1941, at this narrow ravine in what was then open countryside and is now a suburb of the Ukrainian capital, Nazi soldiers massacred 30,000 Ukrainian Jews in a 36-hour orgy that inaugurated three years of systematic slaughter of the Ukrainian Jews.

By the time the Nazi occupation ended in 1943, at least 100,000 bodies, perhaps twice as many, had been tossed into the Babi Yar ravine, part of a total of roughly 4.5 million civilians--Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Gypsies and others--killed during the Holocaust here.

Bush’s visit to memorialize that slaughter was a day full of emotion, but also of irony.

There was, for example, the irony of Bush, a man who often dismisses the past--”That’s history,” he often says of subjects he wants to put behind him--warning his audience about the importance of remembering the past.

“History gives our lives meaning and continuity,” he said. “Any nation that tries to repudiate history--tries to ignore the actors and events that shaped it--only repudiates itself.”

And there were, too, the ironies and complications of history in a land where the past is seldom simple.

Official Soviet histories--and the inscription on the Babi Yar memorial--recall the slaughter as the work of the “German fascist occupiers.” Bush adopted that approach in his speech, saying those who were killed “all died because (of) a maniac in Berlin.”

In fact, although Adolf Hitler and his henchmen masterminded the Holocaust, many of the men who carried out their orders were not Nazis, or even Germans, but Ukrainian Christians, residents of a land that for centuries was one of the chief centers of Jewish population in Eastern Europe, but also one of the chief centers of East European anti-Semitism and horrifying pogroms.

For years, both the central government in Moscow and the Ukrainian government here suppressed all discussion of what had happened at Babi Yar, forbidding the publication of Yevtushenko’s poem, for example, even as it gained fame abroad. Authorities agreed only in 1976 to erect the monument that Bush saw, and even then put it not at the actual site of the killings, but in a park about a mile away. For a decade more, officials steadfastly continued to refuse to concede that Jews were the primary victims here.

Now, however, Yevtushenko has been elected a member of the Soviet legislature from the Ukrainian industrial city of Kharkov. And it is the newly nationalistic government of the Ukraine that has scheduled a weeklong memorial to Babi Yar next month and has agreed to erect a new monument, one with Jewish symbolism, at the actual massacre site.

“The extermination of thousands of Jews” at Babi Yar “should become a warning to mankind” of the dangers of ethnic and religious hatred, Ukrainian party chairman Leonid Kravchuk said in his speech at the memorial. “Let the ashes of the dead . . . become a steadfast guarantor that such tragedies will never, and nowhere, occur again.”

There are ironies, as well, in the condition of the Ukraine’s remaining Jews. Exactly how many there are no one knows. Some estimate 500,000, others say closer to 2 million Jews remain here. But whatever the number, there is no doubt that for Jews in the Ukraine, life has improved dramatically.

“My father always told me about the Jewish people, told me to be proud of my (Jewish) nation,” said Rena Kogan, a 16-year-old from the Ukrainian city of Kirograd, present at the memorial ceremony along with her friends from Camp Shuva L’Tzion--Hebrew for Return to Zion.

“But I never heard about religious things,” she said. Now, by contrast, “We can study Hebrew, we can study our religion.”

Yet the new freedom has led to an unprecedented exodus, as Jews pour out of the Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union, to Israel and the United States. About 60,000 emigrated from the Kiev region in 1990, said Yaakov Bleich, a young Orthodox Jewish rabbi from Brooklyn who came to Kiev two years ago to be the only rabbi here.

Some emigrate out of religious conviction. Others, Bleich conceded, grab the chance to get out that being Jewish provides them. Here, in this city only 60 miles from the still-radioactive Chernobyl nuclear reactor, “people want to get out because of the ecology.”

And despite their new freedom and renewed Jewish life, Kogan and her family are unlikely to stay. Asked if she plans to emigrate, Kogan nodded.

“Maybe this winter,” she said.