When a poet confronted Russia with the Holocaust
With ‘Babi Yar,’ Russia’s beloved dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko forced his countrymen to acknowledge their roles in the mass genocide of their Jewish neighbors
Very rarely, a poem changes the way a nation remembers its history. Russian dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” was one such poem.
Penned in 1961, “Babi Yar” refers to the ravine in Kiev, Ukraine, where more than 33,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis and collaborators during two unprecedented days of slaughter in World War II. Until Yevtushenko’s poem denounced Soviet authorities for covering up the Holocaust and stoking new forms of anti-Semitism, the genocide had been almost totally repressed in the region where it began.
Remembered for criticizing the Soviet system in hundreds of poems, he wrote “Babi Yar” after visiting the infamous ravine more than half a century ago. On the site where the largest massacre of the Holocaust took place, the poet noticed that not one memorial had been erected.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-a-poet-confronted-russia-with-the-holocaust/
