Customer Reviews

Babi Yar

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I first read this book in high school as a shelf clearing library rat. It was not recommended, it was not widely known, it just sat on a shelf gathering dust. As far as I could tell, I was the first person to check this book out of my high school's library....books used to have cards glued to the back page where you signed your name...this one had no signatures. I read "Babi Yar" 3 times in the next 2 weeks and was stunned at the inhumanity of people towards people. I actually had trouble sleeping for a while. I didn't run across this book again for another 25 years. It kind of jumped at me from the shelf at my local library. It offered the same brutal emotional clubbing at 41 that I had experienced at 16. No different. How horrible can we actually be as humans? Pretty damn horrible it appears. The progessive rape of Kiev (et al) by Stalin, the Nazis, and Stalin AGAIN is a mostly overlooked story. This one tells it quite well. Music lovers should listen to Al Stewart's "Roads to Moscow" for a somewhat hurried reference.

This is an important book which I hope will be put back in print soon. The story of the Ukrainian occupation during WWII, as well as Babi Yar death camp are fascinating, if also horrifying. The book covers a theatre of the war that is seldom covered in such detail.

The honesty is the most interesting part. The author, a 12-year-old boy at the time, (and NOT Jewish), had no reason to fabricate, and with an innocence that makes it clear he isn't trying to propogandize, just reports the horrors he sees. The book also includes some later gathered (when the author was grown up) interviews with survivors of Babi Yar death camp which are even more harrowing.

The most fascinating part of the copy that I have is that it BOLDs the portions of the book that were edited out by the Russian censors, before the book was published in the Soviet Union. It is interesting to notice what the censors chose to cut out, as much as what they chose to leave in!

Well worth finding in a used book store, if you can.

I read this book in the original Russian. I could not put it down until I read the whole thing. As far as truthfulness I have absolutely no doubt, since his accounts are the same that I have heard from my own grandparents who fought in and survived in the war. To the reviewer below - Jeannette DuPree (South Carolina), what do the modern historians doubt? The thousands of victims (including the immediate members of my family) of German brutality? It's revisionist lying.

Babi Yar is one of the best books I have ever read, the truth in this book is phenomenal. This documentary made me both laugh and cry and made me furious beyond belief. Coming from grandparents who were forced to spend years of their lives in concentration camps during the Holocaust for the mere reason that they were Jewish, made me really understand how the Jews felt during the book. I definitly recomment this book to everyone!

Babi Yar is easily the best book I have ever read; the prose is wonderful, the perspective refreshing. Never have I enjoyed a book so much, or was so deeply affected. Some argue that
"Night" portrays the Holocaust better, or that the age of the author at the time of the events portrayed undermines their validity- I must disagree. Seeing the horrors so young and describing them with the eyes of a child gives a much different view of the Holocaust than that of an adult, which is typically the perspective we see. This, however, was a child's life and appropriately there is no talk of politics-it is raw emotion, it is hunger, it is the innocent eyes of a child in the most horrible environment. It is truly an amazing book.

This book is a documented portrait of barbaric inhumanity that took place during the holocaust at a ravine called Babi Yar. It is a place that over 33,000 jews were murdered and buried dead or alive. This book is told from the eyes of a young non- jewish boy who lived in Kiev and witnessed the inhumane massacre that took place outside of his city. The book is well written and imposibble to put down. After reading this book, one can understand more about the holocaust and about the chilling and incomprehensible behavior against the jewish nation.

I already knew the details of what happened at Babi Yar but reading this book has affected me nonetheless. It has stayed with me, momentarily making me a bit of a saddened being within my contemporary life that seems so removed from this account. I've always been drawn to Holocaust themed narratives but until recently, I've never made my way into Kuznetsov's book. After purchasing the paperback at a used bookstore some years ago, it sat on my shelf, always waiting for me to get around to it. Sitting like a seed, waiting to grow and educate on someone else's part of humanity, of a different era, in a distant place.

The author Kuznetsov writes of his own experiences as a boy during the two years of German occupation of his city Kiev. The story is told simply, directly, and without the expected bitterness. He treats everyone as humanity, just telling what he saw, like innocence from somewhere above, looking below during those months when everything came together for the worse, so to speak. When German coordination and expert engineering met its human inventory and little Anatoli, not a Jew, was left to pick up the pieces, understand it all, and tell this twenty-first century cubical being what happened.

The book itself seems to have had nearly as a trying existence as its author. Kuznetsov began it as a boy keeping his notes soon after everything happened. First submitted for publication in the early 60's, the Soviet censures quickly rejected it, Kuznetsov excised a little and resubmitted, whereupon it was published in Russia but with further heavy truncations. The forty year old Kuznetsov defected to England in 1969, taking with him the manuscript on film, whereupon the book was translated into English and finally published in its entirety. When Kuznetsov was in London ready to defect, the first person he contacted was newspaper man David Floyd who spoke Russian. Floyd did the translation, which is wonderful -fluid, direct, and I suspect close to original style.

Naturally after reading this account, I attempted to learn more about Kuznetsov but online sources are remarkably scant. There is a precious one hour filmed interview done shortly after his defection currently available on YouTube, but little else. From what I've learned, during the 1950s Kuznetsov worked a number of odd jobs until entering an institute to become a writer. And make no mistake, he became a great writer. Babi Yar is not some basic written account by an amateur witness, but a cleverly composed equal to a long list of great Russian observers of the human condition. Remember, when great writing is truly great, it doesn't appear as "great writing". It's simply communicative, immediately tangible, and meaningful, all of which have embodiment in Kuznetsov's prose.

I suspect however, that even if there wasn't a Second World War and if the events described in the book Babi Yar never really happened, that it was "just fiction", that Kuznetsov's book would remain a memorable composition. Yet, this story is real and I suppose that's why it's affected me so much. I haven't been able to sleep as I keep asking myself why did this have to happen? And not just the massacre at Babi Yar, but all the trials that little Anatoli and his mother had to endure. Why did that boy have to live so close to the yar, where he could hear the machine gunning going on, on, and on? Where his grandfather finally realized what was happing to the thousands of Jews that had gathered on Sep 29th. "Listen to that! They're not deporting them, they're shooting them!" Why did that boy and his mother have to live in a tiny shack going hungry and getting thin? Why did a twelve year old boy have to have a rifle pushed in his face by a German deserter, thinking for sure he was going to shoot him? Why? Why? All of these things have left such an impression on me and I keep thinking back to my own childhood when I was at 12, here in middle America, so far removed from the poverty that Anatoli and his mother, on the skirts of Kiev seventy years ago, survived.

Another testament to the strength of Kuznetsov's writing is how he can be as memorable with the micro as he is with the macro. There is a small passage on the death of his grandmother that is as beautifully written as anything I've read. But Kuznetsov also writes as effectively with the enormous evacuation of the Germans and entire citizenry from Kiev in '43, resulting in an empty, broken landscape, which the boy and his mother inhabit together afterwards, nearly alone in the entire city.

Babi Yar is a widely known book but for some reason, it doesn't seem to be widely read. I suppose many a potential reader pick it up and say "Oh, Babi Yar. -Holocaust, suffering, death, and all that....I'm sure it's a great story, but no thanks". It's too bad because this book is among the greats of Russian literature regardless of historical meaning. From Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekov -Kuznetsov has retained something from each and perfected the new "confessional form" while he did it. The first of those other authors especially, as Babi Yar owes a good deal in theme and style to Gogol's great novel "Dead Souls". Both books do, after all, have a multitude of innocent dead souls inhabiting somewhere behind, always observing, in constant unspoken judgment. But beyond the theme, Kuznetsov's people too are all replicated in Gogolian humbleness. Degtyaryov the sausage maker, with his abundance of rustic cunningness, is as much a character of Gogol as you'll find in twentieth-century fiction.

At the end of the novel, which is a sublime and timeless reflection of all that the author has experienced, Kuznetsov writes how before he left Russia to defect, that he buried the original manuscript near Babi Yar where he was working on the final chapter. I suppose that's where it remains to this day, fittingly perhaps, near the fragments of bone and ash of all the victims, maybe moving, and someday found by another boy like Kuznetsov, raising the curiosity once more. As the boy author who suddenly noticed he was walking on fragments of bone, asked an old man who was passing the ravine; "Hey Mister, is this where they shot all the Jews?"

Wow, this book is insane. Very well written. I am surprised it hasn't been reprinted since the 1970s. It's about the Nazi invasion into Kiev and their 2 year takeover of the city. Babi Yar was a ravine near the city where 70,000 Jews were murdered and 100s of thousands other people as well. The Nazis tried to cover it up by burning everything then the Soviet Union tried to cover it up by building a dam over it. The author is a 12 year old boy when the Nazis invade. The writing is very thorough a...more Wow, this book is insane. Very well written. I am surprised it hasn't been reprinted since the 1970s. It's about the Nazi invasion into Kiev and their 2 year takeover of the city. Babi Yar was a ravine near the city where 70,000 Jews were murdered and 100s of thousands other people as well. The Nazis tried to cover it up by burning everything then the Soviet Union tried to cover it up by building a dam over it. The author is a 12 year old boy when the Nazis invade. The writing is very thorough and easy to follow. It was first published in the Soviet union in 1966 but they censored half of the book, when Kuznetsov came to the US the book was reprinted in 1969 with the things the Soviets took out in bold and adding his additions to the book in brackets. I think this is a little distracting and it would be nice to reprint the book now, especially since it is out of print. I am surprised it is not better known. This is a must read for everyone. Kuznetsov says he wrote the book to try to understand Babi Yar but came no closer to understanding the Nazis after he finished the book, at least we can (hopefully) learn something from history.

http://www.berdichev.org/babi_yar.htm

babi yar is a book written by a young boy from the rememberances of his time in a concentration camp. I first read the book in 1972. Although years and years have past it is a book that I guarantee will never leave your mind and your heart. This is the kind of bok that should be required reading in every highschool Yet tragically I find it is out of print. Continue your search when found and read you will be well rewarded for your persistance.

This is an extremely fascinating and well-written book. It tells the story of not just the horrible massacre of Jews and other "undesireables" by the Nazis in WWII occupied Kyiv, but also of life in Kyiv under Nazi occupation. Equally fascinating is the account of Babyn Yar (its Ukrainian name) long AFTER the Germans had been pushed out. It is the personal, first-hand account of the author who is a 12-year old boy at the time of the German entrance into Kyiv. One correction to a previous review here - according to the editions I have seen of this book, the author is not Jewish, but half-Ukrainian and half-Russian. This is of minor importance other than for those who might be inclined to reject this book as "Jewish Propoganda". It is a very honest work, portraying everyone involved as all-too-human; sharing all characteristics from the noble to the obscence.