80 years after the mass executions of Jews in Babi Yar, this point on the terrible map of the Holocaust, for a long time consigned to oblivion, is becoming a place of memory. On October 6, 2021, the presidents of Israel, Ukraine and Germany meet in Kiev to honor the memory of the victims. During the ceremony dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the tragedy, Dmitry Shostakovich’s 13th symphony, also known as “Babi Yar”, will be performed.
Holocaust Memorial Center “Babi Yar” – still very young and the first museum of its kind in the post-Soviet space – has prepared a new facility for opening on its territory. It will be a sculptural composition of the world famous conceptual artist Marina Abramovich. The Crystal Wailing Wall has already been named one of the largest art objects in Europe, created over the past 10 years. Dimensions: 40 meters long and three meters high.
By the end of the year in Babi Yar, according to the Memorial Center Foundation, the construction of the Kurgan museum space, designed by the architectural company SUB (Berlin), will be completed.
Babi Yar: genocide under bullets
On September 29 and 30, 1941, the paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany shot more than 33,000 Jews in the Babiy Yar tract on the outskirts of occupied Kiev. Einsatzgruppen C reported 33,771 killed to Berlin. Almost the entire Jewish population of the city was destroyed.
The shootings in the ravine, where the next batch of victims were sprinkled with earth on top, layer by layer, continued during the next two years of the occupation. The mentally ill, Sinti and Roma, and prisoners of war were also executed here. Before the withdrawal of German troops from Kiev in 1943, about 100 thousand people were killed in Babi Yar.
Babi Yar: poem and symphony
For a long time, nothing in Babi Yar reminded of the thousands and thousands of innocent victims here. Soviet anti-Semitism did not allow this memory. But in September 1961, Evgeny Yevtushenko found himself on the slope of the ravine. He was brought here by his friend – the writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, who as a 14-year-old boy in Kiev witnessed the tragedy and later described these events in his documentary novel “Babi Yar”. The poet was shocked not only by the incomprehensible crime itself, but also by how the place of the tragedy looked like. There was a dump in the ravine: mountains of rubbish over the remains of victims of monstrous racial ideology. Later, a recreation park was set up here, where children sometimes even played football with the skulls of the dead who were accidentally dug out. “There are no monuments over Babi Yar …” – Yevtushenko’s poem broke the 20-year silence about the tragedy in Babi Yar.
And other bold voices supported him. The most sonorous of them was the voice of Dmitry Shostakovich, who wrote his 13th symphony – in B-flat minor – on the verses of Yevtushenko for bass, male chorus and orchestra. Its first performance took place in Moscow on December 18, 1962 – then neither the conductor Kirill Kondrashin nor the musicians were afraid of reprisals.
Babi Yar: memorial concert
The Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was opened to acquire, study and disseminate knowledge about the tragedy and preserve the memory of the victims. It is here, in the open air, on a specially built stage, that a commemorative concert will take place on October 6. Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphony will be performed by the German Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Thomas Sanderling. The concert is broadcasted by numerous TV and radio stations in Ukraine, Israel and Germany, including DW: live on the DW classical music Youtube channel. The broadcast starts at 5 pm Kyiv time.
“Shostakovich was an ardent anti-Semite,” says German and Russian conductor Thomas Sanderling in an interview with DW. As the son of the legendary German maestro Kurt Sanderling, who lived in the USSR for a long time and was a close friend of Shostakovich, Thomas Sanderling knew the composer personally. “I was really lucky to meet many in my long life between German and Russian cultures,” Sanderling says. “But only one of them was a true genius – Shostakovich.” The composer once entrusted the young conductor with the German premiere of his 13th symphony. With the blessing of Shostakovich, Sanderling also translated the text of the symphony into German.
“Shostakovich,” says Thomas Sanderling, “is a classic that will remain a classic. Like Beethoven. The message from his 13th symphony was and remains a warning to all of us. Performing this piece of music on this site on the anniversary of the tragedy is one of the most exciting moments in my life”.
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