Istanbul Institute of
Russian and Sovietic Studies
“Boys climbed on trees, to see what was happening. And they fell down vomitting: they saw it. We suddenly realized that there was a mass massacre that was happening there”
“Before the Nazi occupation of Kiev the housekeepers were known as the spies of the KGB. After the Nazi occupation they all suddenly converted to Nazi spies. One of them was coming to our house and saying to my mother – who was looking as Jewish because she had a big nose – “Madam, you should go to Babi Yar, why don’t you go to Babi Yar?“
The interview in the video above was made in the winter of 2017 with Yelena Lugovaya, Professor of History, Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kiev, the last survivor of Babi Yar. Her granddaughter, our Kiev representative and Arsenal Art Gallery curator Alisa Lozhkina made the simultaneous translation of the speech.
There are still questions to ask:
How come that people were still going there deliberately, by their own feet? Why others not reacted as Prof Lugovaya’s mother saying “They can catch me and kill me, but I will never go there by my own feet“?
Why Kievan people standing at sides of the street were crying for their Jewish neighbours walking to death BUT not organising them to fight together, namely to start a guerilla war against the occupation (compare and contrast with other countries under Nazi occupation, particularly with Greece)?
Was this fatalistic attitute a results of a multicultural, multireligious “tolerance” culture of that time?
To apply the formulae of Professor Zizek: people already knew what would happen there. But they pretended not to know it. Crying, weeping, sobbing for their Jewish neighbours, this over expression of feelings, was less risky than starting a guerilla war.