Six days after Vladimir Putin sent his army to “denazify” Ukraine, a Russian missile fell on Kyiv, killing five people and – paradoxically – destroying the building that was supposed to house a museum on the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. That missile, so real and so deadly, is also a metaphor for how the war has impacted one of the places that concentrates the most pain in Ukraine: Babin Yar, the old ravine where the Nazis exterminated almost the entire Jewish population of Kyiv.
The Russian invasion has dynamited the grandiose plans to erect a memorial after decades of neglect. Its promoters, who had the enthusiastic support of President Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jew, have become persona non grata. Your money has been stained with blood.
Two Russian oligarchs, Mikhail Fridman and Guerman Khan, Jews of Ukrainian origin and major donors to the Babin Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (BYHMC), have been forced to abandon the project after being placed on the international sanctions list for its ties to the Kremlin.
“It is a logical step and it has been a decision made by them,” says Anna Furman, executive vice president of BYHMC, who admits that the memorial is “on hold”. The jobs already paid will be finished, the rest is suspended.
The war has forced "change the direction" of the project, to "focus all efforts on humanitarian aid," says Furman. According to the new BYHMC website, they are dedicated to evacuating Holocaust survivors, rescuing archives and art collections, distributing food and medicine. "We also have a project to investigate Russian war crimes and another to document and understand the missile attack," the directive says.
Everything gives off a certain aroma of a damage control operation in a company that from day one has been surrounded by controversy due to the Russian origin of its financing. The Babin Yar memorial started in 2016.
The then President Petro Poroshenko presented it as a transcendental step not only for the memory of Ukraine but also for its rapprochement with Europe, and announced that it would be financed by private funds. The main donors were Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
Babin Yar condenses two of the most crucial challenges that Ukraine is grappling with: the accounts of a past that has never been looked at squarely and, at the same time, the grip exerted by the oligarchs – and behind them, Russia – on economic life, politics and culture of the country.
On September 29 and 30, 1941, shortly after the Germans occupied Kyiv, some 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children were rounded up at Babin Yar (Ukrainian; Babi Yar in Russian), stripped naked, and machine-gunned. The massacre marked the beginning of the Holocaust in Ukraine. During the two years of occupation, the Nazis used the ravine to execute Jews, Gypsies, Communists, prisoners of war or psychiatric patients. It is estimated that between 70,000 and 100,000 people died here. Local police also participated in the killings. A conveniently silenced chapter, like the massacre itself.
After the war, the Soviet authorities buried Babin Yar, both metaphorically and literally. The ravine was covered with earth and flattened. They created a park, blocks of flats, a hospital and even a brick factory. In 1962, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited the place and was overwhelmed: “There is no monument in Babin Yar. Just a jagged rock, like a rough tombstone, he-he wrote. The trees judge us. Everything screams, but the scream is made of silence”. The poem was banned.
The Soviet Union did not erect the first monument until 1976. The unmistakably Soviet sculpture is still there, with a plaque remembering the citizens of Kyiv and the murdered prisoners of war. No mention of the Jews.
Today, Babin Yar is a park where old people walk and teenagers take selfies, oblivious to the bones that the earth hides. After independence, there was a boom of monuments, which are scattered in a bewildering potpourri: a menorah, a cross for the murdered Ukrainian nationalists, a car for the gypsies, the sculpture of a girl… But 40% of Ukrainians do not knows what happened here, according to a recent poll. At school, children commemorate the Holodomor (the great famine of 1932-33), the Chernobyl disaster, and the Holocaust each year, but without anything specific in the case of Babin Yar so close.
The project promoted by Fridman and Jan, both born in the Ukraine in Jewish families that suffered extermination, was intended to rescue it from oblivion. big time The $100 million memorial was to cover 150 hectares and included museums, art installations, a research center and archive.
They hired as creative director Iliá Jrzhanovski, an eccentric Russian and Jewish filmmaker who lives between Moscow and London. In line with his experimental cinema, he designed an "immersive art" project, based on virtual reality, where visitors would adopt the role of a Jewish victim, a Nazi executioner or a Ukrainian collaborator. He intended to usher in a new era in Holocaust memorialization. He has not convinced everyone. Several reputed world experts on Jewish extermination have expressed ethical doubts about Jrzhanovski's innovations. He is putting on a "Holocaust Disneyland," said one critic.
But it is the Russian origin of the money that causes the most suspicion. "The ideology of the project is not Ukrainian, but Russian," says Viacheslav Likhachev, a Jewish historian and spokesman for VAAD, the association of Jewish communities in Ukraine, which has actively campaigned against the memorial. “For Putin, the Holocaust and the memory of World War II is a fundamental part of his propaganda to justify the war. He has been using it for 15 years against Ukraine. It is not unreasonable to suspect, in the presence of oligarchs linked to the Kremlin, that the memorial is used to promote a manipulated story that exaggerates the weight of Ukrainian collaborationism. In fact, in 2017, when they presented their first project, Fridman and company spoke very emotionally about collaborationism. There was a strong reaction, and then they were much more cautious,” Likhachev says.
Suspicion has been intensified by a recent news story about Pavel Fuks, a Ukrainian oligarch implicated in the memorial, although Furman says he abandoned the project a year ago. According to Rolling Stone magazine, citing US intelligence sources, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, Fuks hired people to paint swastikas on the streets of Kharkiv and Kyiv. He did it by order of the Kremlin, interested in feeding the specter of a "Nazi Ukraine".
Lijachev is critical of the Ukrainian government for leaving an initiative of this magnitude in private hands. Not only Poroshenko, the initial promoter, but also Zelensky, who has defended the project tooth and nail. At least until the war broke out. Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential office, has been "one of the biggest lobbyists for the Fridman project," says the historian, who points out that the interests of the Alfa Group (Fridman's business conglomerate) in Ukraine "have surely played a paper".
BYHMC has always had a “colonial nature”, says Lijachev. “It's the idea that someone from outside has to come with his wad of money to make a memorial because the Ukrainians don't know how to do it. And instead of working with the historians and experts who know the most about the subject, they put together a monstrous contemporary art project with the most expensive artists in the world.
For his detractors, the departure of the Russian oligarchs is an opportunity to promote an inclusive and less controversial memorial. “There are dozens of memorials and educational projects on the Jewish extermination in Ukraine promoted, for example, by the Institute of History. It will depend on the resources available after the war, but if there is support from the government and civil society, I am convinced that there will be a consensus to promote a memorial in Babin Yar”, Lijachev confides.
“There has never been a Russian project or a Ukrainian project,” Furman counters. “We have always been open to dialogue and constructive criticism. But what we have heard is emotional criticism, not based on the results achieved, but on the Russian nationality of some of our donors,” he notes.
The vice president insists that Fridman and Jan had "every moral right" to participate in the project, as descendants of Ukrainian Jewish families (Jan lost several relatives in Babin Yar; Fridman, in Lviv) and points out that in the supervisory board there are personalities such as Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer or the rabbi of Kyiv and Ukraine, Yaakov Dov Bleich. “I hope we can save this project. We have done an impressive job, which no one had done before. We have changed the way of remembering and learning about the Holocaust in Ukraine”, she states.
“In this country there is a lot of Russian money that is invested in things that are not pretty or good for the community. For once, this money was used for something positive,” sighs Vitali Lusher, a Ukrainian-Israeli who was a yoga teacher and film writer in Israel and now works at Babin Yar. He is an enthusiast of the project. “We don't want the kind of monument where people go twice a year to leave flowers. What we do is different: we seek to make people feel, provoke an emotional reaction, make them reflect. And we got it,” he maintains.
In the last two years, several installations have been inaugurated in Babin Yar, signed by internationally renowned artists. Lusher displays them proudly. The Synagogue that folds like a book, by the Swiss architect Manuel Herz. The Wailing Wall, made of charcoal and quartz, by Marina Abramovic. Or her favorite work, the Mirror Field (field of mirrors): a metal forest pierced by thousands of bullets of the same caliber used by the Nazis, while a melody composed by converting the names of the victims in Hebrew into notes plays.
"To all those people who attack us so much, I ask them: where were you during the last thirty years, while Babin Yar died in oblivion?", launches Lusher, who is convinced that criticism is the result of envy "and in some cases, from the rage of not having been able to get a slice ”.
Yuri Pokras, 61, has come to visit the Herz synagogue. Donning a yarmulke, a Star of David necklace and a Hebrew tattoo, you don't have to ask him if he's Jewish. Eight people from his family died in Babin Yar. He is here because his grandfather, in his twenties, was able to escape from Kyiv. “The worst did not happen in Babin Yar, you know? Many Jews were killed on the streets of Kyiv. They were killed by their own neighbors,” he says.
Yuri looks up at the blue ceiling of the synagogue, where the stars that shone in Babin Yar on that dismal night in September 1941 are drawn. tourist, he says. What I want is for my family to rest in peace."
