“It was a huge ravine—one might even say majestic—deep and wide, like a mountain gorge. If you shouted from one edge, you would barely be heard on the other. It lay between three Kyiv districts: Lukyanovka, Kurenivka, and Syrets, surrounded by cemeteries, groves, and vegetable gardens. Along its bottom there always flowed a very pleasant, clear little stream.
The slopes were steep, precipitous, sometimes almost sheer, and landslides often occurred in Babyn Yar. … We knew this stream like the back of our hand: as children we dammed it with little makeshift dikes—‘gátki’—and swam there. … It had good, coarse-grained sand, but now, for some reason, it was all strewn with white pebbles. I bent down and picked one up to examine it. It was a burned fragment of bone, the size of a fingernail, white on one side and black on the other. The stream was washing them out from somewhere and carrying them along. And so we walked for a long time over these little bones, until we came to the very beginning of the ravine, and the stream disappeared…
Here the ravine narrowed, branched into several heads, and in one place the sand turned gray. Suddenly we realized that we were walking on human ashes.”
This is how the opening chapter, “Ashes,” of the famous documentary novel Babyn Yar by the Soviet non-returnee writer Anatoly Kuznetsov begins (in 1969 he left the USSR for London and sought political asylum there; he died in 1979 in the United Kingdom).
A native of Kyiv, Kuznetsov was a teenager during the Second World War. His family—his mother, grandfather, grandmother, and the future writer himself—was unable to evacuate when the Germans arrived, like hundreds of thousands of other Kyiv residents. Life under occupation was difficult and dangerous. Yet it was the memory of what happened at Babyn Yar that became the most sinister for young Tolya—a true nightmare, one that would thereafter be impossible to forget.
At the same time, Anatoly Kuznetsov himself did not witness the events as they unfolded: like most Kyiv residents, on the morning of September 29, 1941, he merely watched as local Jews, by the thousands, moved toward the designated assembly points, complying with an unclear order (unclear because ordinary people—and the Jews themselves, in the overwhelming majority—truly did not know the grim truth). Only later did twelve-year-old Tolya (who is the protagonist of the novel) hear the machine-gun bursts—“quiet, calm, measured firing, like at training exercises.”
“—Could it be a firing range?—I suggested.
—What firing range!—Grandfather cried out plaintively. The whole of Kurenivka is already talking about it—they climbed trees and saw…”
After the war, Anatoly Kuznetsov graduated from the Literary Institute (he managed to enroll only in 1955, after Stalin’s death—under the leader’s lifetime, those who had lived under occupation were not admitted) and became a professional writer. He published “industrial” novellas in the genre of socialist realism—virtually the only one permitted by the Soviet authorities. But the writer understood, felt with all his heart: readers simply had to learn about what he had seen and heard on that cold September day in 1941. The novel Babyn Yar was published (in heavily abridged form) in 1966 in the magazine Yunost, and a year later—in book form, by the publishing house Molodaya Gvardiya.
True, five years earlier, in 1961, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko had published a poem of the same title in Literaturnaya Gazeta, which also gained wide renown. But it was precisely the novel’s format that made it possible to convey the tragedy in all its details—details that even today, 85 years later, still make the blood run cold. The numerous editorial revisions imposed by censors and the cuts that distorted the author’s intent pushed Kuznetsov toward desperate steps. An enraged writer even retrieved the manuscript from the editorial office of Yunost—but the publisher had already made a copy: once the novel with revisions had been approved “up there,” it could no longer be left unpublished.
Anatoly Kuznetsov died in exile, in London, twelve years before the collapse of the USSR. His book-testimony easily outlived the Soviet state and was reissued many times—this time without any cuts. Thanks to Anatoly Kuznetsov’s novel and other sources, the history of Babyn Yar is known throughout the world. And yet, from time to time—especially as commemorative dates approach—it makes sense to recall it, so that present and future generations will remember.
On September 19, 1941, the Battle for Kyiv came to an end: in a largely unsuccessful attempt to avoid encirclement (out of 450,000 soldiers and officers, only 20–25 thousand broke through to their own lines), Soviet troops abandoned the Ukrainian capital, and the Germans entered the city on the Dnipro.
Eyewitnesses later recalled how, amid the deafening cannonade and exploding bombs, Red Army soldiers were the first to flee—through courtyards and vegetable gardens, jumping over fences. “…They ran into houses, begging for civilian clothes, and the women hurriedly gave them some rags; they changed, hoping to hide, and the women drowned useless weapons and tunics with insignia in cesspits…” Soon the cannonade subsided, and an anxious silence fell. It was shattered by cries of “The Germans!” coming from all sides.
The Germans entered the city ceremoniously, in long automobile and motorcycle columns—there were few infantrymen on foot, and the guns were pulled by enormous German draft horses. Anatoly Kuznetsov later wrote how struck he was by these giants: next to them, Soviet horses looked like pitiful, scrawny foals. Naturally, in the first publications of Babyn Yar this comparison was excised by the censors.
The great city met the new authorities warily and at the same time with hope. Some—like the Kuznetsov family’s neighbor, Elena Pavlovna—did not hide their excited joy: “Why are you sitting there? The Germans have come. Soviet power is over!” She was also touched when she saw a German soldier up close for the first time: “My windows face the street. The vehicle drove off, and he—young, handsome—stands there!…” Anatoly Kuznetsov’s grandfather admired the Germans’ appearance and uniforms: “How can Stalin fight them, Lord forgive me. This is an army! Not our wretched lot—hungry and barefoot. Just look at how he’s dressed!”—and he too hoped for the best: “Thank God, this ragamuffin власть is over; I thought I wouldn’t live to see it…”
But the initial enthusiasm soon faded. The Germans behaved like masters: the general staff and senior officers occupied the best apartments in the very center of Kyiv—on the legendary Khreshchatyk. Soldiers and junior officers carried out mass requisitions of food. An order to the population was issued immediately: under threat of execution, all firearms and radio receivers were to be surrendered within the shortest possible time. The threat of summary execution put an end to spontaneous looting of shops left without supervision. Kyiv residents joked grimly that capital punishment seemed to be the only penalty known to the new authorities. Nevertheless, despite the deadly threats contained in the orders, the Germans were in excellent spirits.
The occupiers’ mood changed very soon—already on September 24. On that day, powerful explosions shook the capital of Ukraine. The first bombs exploded in the “Detsky Mir” building at the corner of Khreshchatyk and Prorizna Street, where a German garrison was stationed, as well as in a former confectionery nearby. These were followed by an explosion at the Spartak Hotel across the street—this housed the commandant’s office, and dozens of German vehicles were standing near the building at the moment of the blast. A gigantic fire broke out in the city center and raged for several days—in scale it is fully comparable, for example, to the Moscow fire of 1812. The flames engulfed about 20 hectares.
Hundreds of Germans and Kyiv residents were killed in the explosions and fires (there are still no precise statistics), and the historic center of Kyiv was almost completely destroyed. In particular, the Ukrainian capital lost two landmark buildings that had largely defined the city’s appearance before the war: the City Duma and the 70-meter “Ginzburg Skyscraper,” built even before the Revolution. In total, around 940 buildings were destroyed. About 50,000 city residents were left without shelter.
There is still no precise information about the operation to mine the center of Kyiv. However, there is no doubt that explosive devices were planted by NKVD operatives even before the Soviet troops withdrew—later, Kyiv residents recalled how suspicious vehicles would drive into courtyards at night. No one attached much significance to this, and there were no volunteers eager to investigate: the anxious nights of 1937–1938—the peak of the repressions—were still fresh in people’s memories, when entire families disappeared after nighttime visits by the “black vans.” To this day, there is debate about the purpose of such a brutal action by the Soviet security services. According to one version, the Chekists sought not only to inflict as much damage as possible on the Germans, but also to enrage them to the maximum, thereby making resistance by the population inevitable—as a response to mass reprisals.
One way or another, it clearly succeeded in pushing the Germans toward repression. After the explosions in central Kyiv, the occupiers truly went berserk. These were no longer the neatly dressed, rosy-cheeked, smiling “gentlemen,” confident in their superiority as representatives of the “master race.” In soiled, damaged uniforms, bloodied, with grimy faces, the Germans roamed Kyiv in search of saboteurs; fear was evident in their eyes. And great fear, as is well known, often leads to violence.
By the time the Germans occupied Kyiv, an order for the total extermination of Jews in the occupied territories of the USSR was already in force. This was an integral part of the cannibalistic racial policy of the Third Reich. However, destruction was usually preceded by preparatory steps: registration, concentration, and isolation. In Poland (Warsaw, Łódź), western Ukraine (Lviv), and Belarus (Minsk), vast Jewish ghettos were created.
The escalation of the situation in Kyiv, however, prompted the occupiers to “solve the Jewish question” at an accelerated pace. After the great fire, a gloomy, ominous atmosphere settled over the city. The lull felt like a harbinger of a new storm. Rumors spread through the city about Jewish involvement in the explosions—and these rumors, of course, fueled the growth of everyday antisemitism. And soon another sensational piece of news agitated Kyiv residents.
“Congratulations to you! Well! … Looks like they were telling the truth when they said it was they who burned down Khreshchatyk. … Let them go to their Palestine now—at least the Germans will deal with them. They’re being taken away! The order is posted,” Tolya Kuznetsov heard from his grandfather. He recalled that he immediately ran headlong into the street. A gray poster, printed on poor-quality wrapping paper, without a title and without a signature, was pasted on a fence:
“All Jews of the city of Kyiv and its environs must appear on Monday, September 29, 1941, by 8:00 a.m. at the corner of Melnykovska and Dokhturovska Streets (near the cemeteries). Bring documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothing, underwear, etc. Any Jew who fails to comply with this order and is found elsewhere will be shot. Any citizen who enters apartments left by Jews and appropriates property will be shot.”
Obviously, the text of the order was drafted by a German: the street names are distorted. In total, about two thousand such notices were posted throughout the city. In the novel, Kuznetsov reproduces the text from memory—it differs from the original order preserved in the archives; however, the difference is insignificant.
Twelve-year-old Tolya Kuznetsov—a curious, restless adolescent—of course could not miss such a spectacle as the mass “eviction” of Jews from Kyiv. At first, he perceived it as just another diversion; thoughts even crossed his mind in the spirit of the same everyday antisemitism: “And suddenly—unexpectedly even for myself, somehow spontaneously—I thought in my grandfather’s words, even with his intonation and malice: Ah! So what? Let them go to their Palestine then. They’ve had it too good, gotten fat! … And Shurka Matsa (Tolya Kuznetsov’s friend—M. K.)—he’s a lousy Jew too, crafty, spiteful, he’s swindled me out of so many books!”
Tolya saw how Jews set out while it was still dark, trying to get to the “train” earlier and secure places. There were many children, elderly people, and the disabled among them: most men had been mobilized into the army; a few well-connected individuals or those who had amassed substantial capital had managed to evacuate; those left behind were the old, the young, and the infirm.
“Bundles tied with rope, battered plywood suitcases, patched bags, boxes with carpenters’ tools… Children cried loudly, and old women carried, slung around their necks like giant necklaces, wreaths of onions—provisions for the journey… Along Hlybochytska Street a solid crowd was moving up toward Lukyanovka, a sea of heads—the Jewish Podil was on the move. Oh, that Podil!.. [That most squalid district of Kyiv could be recognized by its heavy air alone—a mixture of rot, cheap fat, and drying laundry. From time immemorial, Jewish poverty had lived here, the rootless poor: cobblers, tailors, coal merchants, tinsmiths, porters, saddlers …].”
The scenes of the “eviction” shook the boy and awakened warm, genuinely human feelings in his soul: “But why is this happening?—I thought, immediately and completely forgetting my yesterday’s antisemitism.—No, this is cruel, unjust, and I feel terribly sorry for Shurka Matsa; why is he suddenly being driven out like a dog?! Even if he swindled books, it’s because he’s forgetful—and I myself, how many times did I unfairly beat him?”
Most participants in the agonizing procession still did not know what awaited them—or rather, they believed that a resettlement of Jews was indeed being planned. This belief was reinforced by a statement made the day before by nine leading rabbis: “after sanitary processing, all Jews and their children, as an elite nation, will be transferred to safe places…”. The statement was made under the barrels of German submachine guns.
But anxious rumors were already spreading through the crowd. One agitated, no longer young woman said: “Good people, this is death!” The old women burst into tears in response—“as if they began to sing.” Someone said they had seen Karaites in long robes reaching down to their heels. They had prayed all night in their synagogue, then came out and preached: “Children, we are going to our deaths—prepare yourselves. Let us accept it courageously, as Christ accepted his.” One woman poisoned her children and poisoned herself so as not to go. Near the Opera House, a girl threw herself from a window…
Suddenly word came from somewhere that ahead, on Melnykov Street, there was a cordon: they were letting people through it, but not allowing anyone back. The human sea stirred and began to murmur. Tolya Kuznetsov was frightened: what if he could not get out of the crowd and was taken away himself? The boy convulsively forced his way through the ranks and finally broke free, then wandered for a long time through the emptied streets. From time to time he ran into latecomers—they were hurrying to catch up with the main flow. “From the gates they whistled and jeered at them as they went by…”
Tolya soon found himself back at home and guessed what was happening in Babyn Yar by the sound of gunfire. Later, only the executioners (and those very reluctantly, minimizing their role in what had happened) and the miraculously surviving victims could describe in detail what went on there. The latter numbered only thirty—out of more than 100,000 (according to other data, about 150,000) Jews from Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities who were shot at Babyn Yar during the years of occupation. On September 29–30, 1941 alone, according to the Nazis’ own calculations, 33,771 people were killed there—not counting children under the age of three…
The actress of the Kyiv Puppet Theatre, Dina Pronicheva, had turned thirty shortly before the war. Like thousands of other Kyiv Jews, she learned about the “relocation” from copies of the order posted all over the city. Dina’s husband was Russian, with a Russian surname—and in appearance she did not resemble a Jew, and she spoke Ukrainian well. Dina discussed the order with her parents—they decided that the elderly parents would go, while she would only see them off and remain in Kyiv with the children, her son and daughter. Come what may.
Early in the morning of September 29, Dina was at her parents’ home on Turgenevskaya Street. They were already packed: they took clothing and the bare necessities; they had no valuables. They were worried—Dina’s mother had recently undergone surgery—how would she manage the journey? For some reason, they did not doubt that “everyone will be put on a train in Lukyanovka and taken to Soviet territory.”
There were very many people in the city—especially on Artem Street. People were moving on foot and in two-wheeled carts; occasionally even trucks appeared. The flow was moving extremely slowly… By some gates, German soldiers stood, carefully eyeing the girls. Apparently Dina caught their attention—they loudly called out to her to wash floors, but she waved them off.
At some point, together with the crowd, Dina reached a place where people were required to neatly pile their personal belongings. Some took this as a good sign: “The things will go as baggage, of course—we’ll sort it out on the spot.” But Dina felt a chill of dread: “There was nothing even remotely like a railway station. She did not yet know what it was, but with her whole being she felt: this is not an evacuation. Anything at all—but not an evacuation.” Surely many felt the same—yet very few dared to admit their darkest suspicions to themselves…
Soviet citizens lived in an information vacuum. The absolute majority of Soviet Jews in 1941 had never even heard of Hitler’s atrocities in Europe: Soviet media said not a word about them. And the older generation still remembered the First World War—how the Germans had been in Ukraine then and had treated Jews politely, with respect.
Meanwhile, people were ordered to remove their warm clothing. A soldier darted up to Dina and deftly pulled off her fur coat. “…She felt an animal terror; her consciousness clouded.” Her parents urged Dina to go back—she rushed to the cordon and tried to explain: she had only come to see them off; her children were still in the city… But her passport was checked—and she was not let out. Secretly, Dina tore her passport into tiny pieces and threw them away. In the chaos she searched for her parents—but they had already been let through; she could not catch up—the line had stopped. And soon hell began…
People passed through a living corridor of German soldiers—they wielded clubs, beating those doomed to death until they bled. And farther on—on a grassy clearing—the remaining clothes were torn from people and the beatings continued, to keep them from coming to their senses. At that moment Dina heard her mother’s voice for the last time: “My daughter, save yourself—you don’t look like one of them!…”
The young woman heeded the advice and stepped aside. She still had documents—a work record book and a trade-union card—where nationality was not indicated. This time her Russian surname convinced the guards that Dina was there by mistake—there turned out to be about fifty people like her, “escorts.”
And by then the machine-gun bursts were already sounding in full force… Everything that was happening struck Dina as a mad, monstrous dream. But all her life she could not forget that some people laughed hysterically, and that some went gray before her eyes—standing in line for execution. “Mothers fussed especially over their children, so from time to time some German or auxiliary policeman, losing his temper, would snatch a child from a mother, walk up to the sandy wall and, swinging back, hurl it over the crest like a log…”
It began to grow dark. The shootings stopped, and it seemed that Dina should now be released. But a car arrived—from it stepped a tall, elegant German holding a riding crop. Seeing about fifty “escorts” gathered on a knoll, he flew into a rage and ordered them shot immediately: “If even one of them gets out of here and tells the city, tomorrow not a single Jew will come.” There was undisguised cynicism in his words: could it really be that anyone in the city would fail to understand what had actually happened here?
Dina, together with the others, was led to the edge of a huge ravine with almost sheer walls. She looked down “and her head spun—it was so high. Below was a sea of bloodied bodies, and on the opposite edge of the ravine Dina managed to make out mounted machine guns and German soldiers”: it looked as though they were brewing coffee amid this hell. “One of the Germans stepped away from the fire, took up the machine gun, and began to shoot. Dina did not so much see as feel how bodies began to tumble from the edge and how the tracer line of bullets was drawing closer to her. A thought flashed through her: ‘Now I… Now!’ Without waiting, she threw herself down, clenching her fists…”
Dina survived—the bullets did not hit her, and the bodies of the dead softened the fall. But the next several days of her life were a continuation of the nightmare. First the executioners began covering the bodies with sand—Dina did not move until the sand completely clogged her mouth. “Then she flailed desperately, fearing death by suffocation more than by a bullet.” But she managed to remain unnoticed by the killers. Up above, they clearly did not want to work—after tossing down a little sand, they left.
…Then Dina crawled for a long time along the sandy wall in pitch darkness, until she came upon a bush—and beside it, Motya, a living, unharmed boy of about nine. Together they hid from the Germans, especially carefully in daylight—trying to take cover somewhere in thick shrubs. They moved by crawling. Exhausted, two days without a single drop of water, they did not know how to make their way safely back into the city—but they heard machine-gun bursts: on September 30, the shootings continued. Later Dina realized that all this time they had been very close to Babyn Yar.
On the morning of October 1, they continued crawling through the bushes, and Motya was spotted by the Germans. The boy cried out, warning Dina—and was killed. But the Germans did not understand his words, and Dina managed to lie low.
That same day Dina was nevertheless seized—but not shot; instead, she was loaded into a vehicle with Soviet prisoners of war. They were driven somewhere, and Dina and Lyuba (Lyuba was a nurse who had been encircled) seized a moment to escape: they jumped from the truck at full speed. At first they hid at the home of the wife of Dina’s cousin, and then moved to Darnytsia.
Trying to hide from the Gestapo, Dina constantly changed her places of refuge. In February 1942 she was arrested again, and spent 28 days in Lukyanivska Prison. She was saved by a police auxiliary who was in fact a partisan. For a long time Dina was separated from her children and was reunited with them only after Kyiv was liberated, finding her son and daughter in local orphanages. She continued working at the Puppet Theatre. In January 1946 she testified at the Kyiv trial of the executioners of Babyn Yar, and in the 1960s at similar trials in Germany. She actively contributed to preserving the memory of the tragedy: she took part in gatherings at Babyn Yar and maintained contact with other survivors.
The shootings of Jews at Babyn Yar continued on October 1, 2, 8, and 11, 1941. Mass executions of people from various categories did not cease there until the end of the occupation. And not far from Babyn Yar, on the site of a former Red Army military camp, the Syrets concentration camp was established, where communists, Komsomol members, underground activists, and prisoners of war were held. In total, at least 25,000 people were executed there.
At Babyn Yar an experimental soap-making plant was set up to produce soap from the bodies of the murdered, but the Germans did not manage to complete it. Retreating from Kyiv and attempting to conceal the traces of their crimes, in August–September 1943 the Nazis partially destroyed the camp, exhumed and burned tens of thousands of bodies on open “pyres.” The bones were ground up using machines brought from Germany, and the ashes were scattered around the Babyn Yar area. On the night of September 29, 1943, an uprising broke out at Babyn Yar among 329 condemned prisoners forced to work at the pyres; 18 of them escaped, while the remaining 311 were shot. The survivors later testified about the Nazis’ attempts to conceal their crimes.
The executioners of Babyn Yar did not manage to evade retribution. The principal perpetrators were convicted in Germany in 1947–1948. The commandant of Kyiv, Major General Kurt Eberhard—who had issued the order for the first shootings—committed suicide in 1947 while in American captivity in Stuttgart. Paul Blobel, commander of SS Sonderkommando 4a, which carried out Eberhard’s order, was sentenced to death by hanging in 1948; the sentence was carried out three years later. Blobel’s superior, SS Brigadeführer and Police Major General Otto Rasch, was also sentenced to death; he died in the prison hospital in Nuremberg on November 1, 1948.
Among those in the dock at the Kyiv Trial (January 1946), at which Dina Pronicheva testified as a witness, was SS Gruppenführer Paul Scheer, head of the Security Police and Gendarmerie of the Kyiv and Poltava regions. He, along with eleven other German generals and officers, was hanged on January 29, 1946, on Kalinin Square (today Independence Square).
And twenty years later—from October 1967 to November 1968—the Darmstadt Regional Court tried ten participants of Sonderkommando 4a. The principal defendant, Paul Blobel’s deputy Kuno Kallsen, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
…Nearly half a century has passed since both Dina Pronicheva and the writer who told her story, Anatoly Kuznetsov, left this world. Today, what happened at Babyn Yar on those cold autumn days of 1941 may at first glance seem distant and almost unreal—as if drawn from a nightmarish dream. Alas. In 2026, the former world no longer appears so unshakable. Universal values and moral norms are once again being tested. And therefore the lessons of the Babyn Yar tragedy are more relevant than ever.
Dina Pronicheva recalled that when she realized it was the end and was seized by panic terror, an elderly man asked her to help him walk—he was blind. “Grandfather, where are they taking us?” Dina asked. “My child,” he said, “we are going to pay our last debt to God.”
That nameless, helpless old man in 1941 was so strong in spirit that he was able to meet death with dignity. One would like to believe that distant descendants will be able to preserve the memory of the tragedy and prevent its recurrence…
06.02.2026
Author: Mikhail Krivitsky
Translated by Lena Lores
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The Tragedy of Babyn Yar
Anatoly Kuznetsov
