NEVER HEARD
Holocaust Denial and the Fight for Memory at Babi Yar
- Danny M. Cohen -
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Portrait of Malvina Babat (age 4) and Polina Babat (age 3), who were murdered by Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar. Portrait date: Between 1940 and Monday, September 1, 1941. Portrait location: Kiev [Ukraine], USSR. Credit: Babi Yar Society. Copyright: Public Domain.
NEVER HEARD
What does it mean to be unheard? Before we can answer this, we have to ask: What does it mean to be heard? To hear someone’s cry is to bear witness. Yet it’s quite possible that the person in pain does not know we can hear. So sometimes, it’s not enough to hear. We must listen. To listen – to say I can hear you – is to offer comfort. To stop and watch – to say I am here and I can see you – is to give the gift of recognition. To nod – to say I can see your pain and I believe you – is to open the door to healing. Because believing someone’s story – to say I trust what you are saying, even when others deny your truth – is to oppose the original violence, to refute the false justification of the suffering. But listening and nodding still is not enough. To truly be heard is to have one’s story retold. Because when we remember and retell someone else’s truth, we are saying, I stand with you in your fight for justice. So if that’s what it means to be heard – if being heard offers a path to rebuilding life – then being unheard must mean the opposite. And surely the opposite – to be unheard, to be denied one’s truth – can only mean devastation. GENOCIDE DENIAL We are led to ask: Why and how do some Holocaust histories become unheard? Why and how do they become forgotten? According to Nazi reports, at Babi Yar, on the edge of Kiev, over two days – the 29th and 30th of September 1941 – Einsatzgruppen (the Nazi mobile killing squads) shot and murdered 33,771 Jewish people, including thousands of children. And the killing didn’t stop. Over many more months, German authorities murdered even more Jewish people at Babi Yar. They also murdered Communists, non-Jewish spouses of Jews, Soviet Prisoners of War, and Roma, bringing the total number of deaths at Babi Yar to approximately 100,000 people. In November 1943, Kiev was liberated by the Soviet Army. But immediately, and for decades after the war, the Nazi massacres at Babi Yar were not only unheard; they were distorted and even denied. As scholar Karel Berkhoff explained, “After the Nazis left, callous decisions were taken with regard to the site. Almost all of the Soviet Communist officials who returned in November 1943 disrespected the human remains interred at Babi Yar […] they stubbornly refused to state that the victims of the main massacre perpetrated there had been Jews, killed simply because they were Jews. And these authorities allowed no dissent: they intimidated and persecuted the people who disagreed and who wished to pay their respects to the dead” (Berkhoff, 2011). This government-sanctioned distortion and denial of Jewish suffering continued for decades. And so we see the first trigger of marginalization: Denying victimhood. This phenomenon is not unique to the Babi Yar massacres. For example, Roma people across Europe – including the Roma murdered at Babi Yar – were not considered victims of Nazism until the early 1980s. The Roma were denied victimhood and so they were denied reparations. They were denied acknowledgement and so they were denied public commemoration. Scholar Gregory Stanton identified eight – and later ten – stages of genocide, beginning with classification and including discrimination, dehumanization, and extermination. The final stage, he argues, is denial. Denial “lasts throughout and always follows a genocide. […] The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims” (Stanton, 2015). A MENORAH SET ON FIRE IN 2015 Genocide denial incorporates the intentional distortion of history, the dismissal of human rights, the destruction and concealment of evidence, and the intentional exclusion from commemoration and exclusion from the pages of history, all in the service of continued persecution. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, antisemitism in the Soviet Union and across Europe endured. And it persists today. Berkhoff explained how, after the war, “The Communist Party prohibited serious study and commemoration of the mass murder [at Babi Yar], as it did of the Holocaust in general” (Berkhoff, 2011). Archival records on the Nazi era remained classified for the entirety of the Soviet Union’s existence. Only after Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, after many years of advocacy, did the local and international Jewish communities win their fight for a memorial to be constructed to the Jewish victims of Babi Yar. Around the same time, according to a report published by the United Nations, Russian authorities began to permit the slow and patchy introduction of Holocaust education. But the inclusion of the Holocaust in a draft of the official Russian Standard for History Education did not occur until 2003 (Altman, 2015). On the first night of Rosh Hashanah, just two weeks ago, on the site of the massacres, vandals placed tires “around the Menorah [monument in the Babi Yar Memorial Park], poured an inflammatory liquid over them and set them alight,” making this the sixth vandalism incident at the Babi Yar site this year (Sokol, 2015). Should we be surprised? If denial is the final phase of genocide, then genocide denial and the suppression of Holocaust history by perpetrators, their collaborators, oppressive governments, and neo-Nazis is a reality that, although not to be tolerated, is to be expected. HOW TO FORGET HISTORY But there is a quieter, sadder, and unexpected side of marginalization and the forgetting of history. In our attempt to remember the Holocaust, in our rush to learn lessons from the past and to scream at the world for allowing Hitler and his collaborators to destroy entire communities, we simplify. We simplify history. We worry that the public can’t handle complexity. We assume that young people aren’t interested, or won’t pay attention for very long. And so we simplify. In doing so, we leave out whole narratives that, over time, become marginalized and forgotten. The story of Babi Yar is often unheard. The actions of the Einsatzgruppen – and the stories of their victims and of Russian Holocaust survivors – are sometimes omitted from both Holocaust education and Holocaust commemoration. In general, public memory of the Holocaust in the East is superficial. Russian Holocaust survivors and relatives of victims of the Einsatzgruppen often feel unheard. We recognize the photograph of a solider pointing a rifle at a woman who stands, holding what appears to be a young child. We recognize photographs of women, stripped of their clothes and dignity, standing in line, covering their bodies with their hands, waiting to be shot. But the lives of these people from before the war, and the details of their experiences, are largely unknown. The Nazis’ Jewish and Roma victims in the East were dragged from their homes into the forests and fields. As they walked, they carried their belongings and they clutched family photographs and treasures, imbued with memories of a world about to be destroyed. And they carried each other, because many of the elderly and children – so many children – couldn’t walk by themselves. There are reports of local townsfolk watching and sighing at the sorrowful sight, but also reports that some locals jeered and shouted insults as the Jews walked toward the ravine. Some had already figured out their fates, especially when their identity documents were taken from them and burned. As they walked toward Babi Yar, soldiers forced most of them to undress. Their clothes and valuables were stolen from them. Then, one by one, they were shot into open mass graves. Some jumped into the ravine before they could be shot, only to be finished off later. According to one Nazi soldier who gave testimony about what he did, he and his comrades made sure to shoot parents before shooting the children, so that the adults wouldn’t be forced to watch their children die. But other reports tell a different story: Stories of dogs and beatings and babies torn from their mothers’ arms to be thrown alive into the pit. Most people died right away, but some writhed in the pits, wounded, close to death, and, hanging onto life, were crushed and suffocated by the dead who fell on top of them. The massacres at Babi Yar are shocking and obscene. Yet, when the public talks about Holocaust history, our minds tend to jump to gas, rather than bullets, as the method of murder. Why is this? SYMBOLS & SIMPLIFICATIONS I am the grandson of a Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. My grandfather’s name was Maurice Ziekenoppasser. I never met him. But my middle name is Maurice, and so his memory has followed me throughout my life. We don’t know my grandfather’s full story, but we’re pretty sure his extended family was murdered in the Nazi gas chambers of Auschwitz and Sobibor. My family’s story fits alongside the stories of Anne Frank and Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo and Elie Wiesel. My grandfather’s story is connected to the camps. And the trains. The trains, headed to the Nazi killing camps, marked the final journeys and deadly destinations of my family’s Holocaust story. The Nazi trains and camps and barbed wires have become symbols of the Holocaust. The ovens and chimneys are symbols, too, symbols that have become placeholders for a complex history that, within mainstream collective memory, seem to have merged into one single, oversimplified event. The Nazi gas chambers – first used on mentally and physically disabled Germans and Austrians, and later used to murder Jews and Roma – represent the industrialization of mass-murder. In the public consciousness, Auschwitz represents the epitome of human suffering. And yet the competition for suffering is false. Pain is pain. One person’s horror cannot be compared to the horror of another. Even so, in many ways, Auschwitz has become the single story of the Holocaust. Why is this? Because how and why the gas chambers were created is crucial to our understanding of Nazi ideology. Images of emaciated prisoners in striped uniforms behind barbed wires shocked the world. The sheer vastness of the Auschwitz camp complex overwhelmed all preconceptions of what atrocities humanity was capable of committing. And so Auschwitz became a focal point of mainstream conceptions of the Holocaust. The gas chambers became shorthand for modern-day barbarity. But this led to an unintentional forgetting and marginalization of so many other victim narratives. RETELLING EACH OTHER'S STORIES At Babi Yar, in August 1943, almost two years after the massacres began, in an attempt to erase the evidence of their crimes, the SS ordered prisoners to dig up the bodies in the ravine and burn them. At this time, the SS also installed a mobile gas van at Babi Yar. So, when we remember the chimneys at Auschwitz, we must remember that murder by gas and the burning of humans came to Babi Yar, too. We have a responsibility to remember together the distinct events of the Holocaust. The horrors of Auschwitz are separate from the horrors of Babi Yar. But they are utterly connected. What does it mean to be unheard? To be unheard is to be forgotten. And so we must hear. And we must bear witness. And we must listen. Because to listen is offer comfort. To say I am here and I can see you is to give the gift of recognition. To nod – to say I can see your pain and I believe you – is to open the door to healing. Because believing someone’s story – to say I trust what you are saying, even when others deny your truth – is to oppose the original violence. But listening and nodding still is not enough. To truly be heard is to have one’s story retold. Because when we remember and retell someone else’s truth, when we retell each other’s stories, then we stand together in the fight for justice and memory. REFERENCES & FURTHER READING:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009). The danger of a single story. TEDGlobal. Video and transcript Ilya Altman (retrieved 2015) Holocaust education in Russia today: Its challenges and achievements, United Nations. Full text Karel C. Berkhoff (2011). Babi Yar: Site of mass murder, ravine of oblivion, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Full text Sam Sokol (2015), Babi Yar Holocaust site vandalized for sixth time this year, The Jerusalem Post. Full text Gregory Stanton (retrieved 2015), The ten stages of genocide, Genocide Watch. Full text United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (retrieved 2015), Kiev and Babi Yar, Holocaust Encyclopedia. Full text |
Copyright 2015. Danny M. Cohen. All Rights Reserved.
Text of keynote speech by Danny M. Cohen, Ph. D.
at "Never Heard, Never Forget"
- a commemoration presented by Holocaust Community Services
to honor Russian victims and survivors of the Holocaust
and mark the 74th anniversary of
the massacre at Babi Yar in 1941,
held on Sunday September 27 2015 at the
Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.
Copyright 2015. Danny M. Cohen. All Rights Reserved.
Text of keynote speech by Danny M. Cohen, Ph. D.
at "Never Heard, Never Forget"
- a commemoration presented by Holocaust Community Services
to honor Russian victims and survivors of the Holocaust
and mark the 74th anniversary of
the massacre at Babi Yar in 1941,
held on Sunday September 27 2015 at the
Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.