Цитаты
Спасение человечества заключено в сердце человека, в способности человека к самопознанию, в человеческой кротости и в человеческой ответственности. Вацлав Гавел |
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Statement to the 70th anniversary of tragedy of Babiy Yar
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 On these days it is the 70th anniversary of one of the most terrible tragedies of the World War II – mass executions in Babiy Yar. For many decades the anniversary of Babiy Yar is the dreadful lesson of the past that should not repeat any more.
On September 29-31, 1941 fascists executed more than 33 thousand Jews in Babiy Yar. Human understanding can’t comprehend what happened here. People were undressed, beaten and executed. According to recollections of eye-witnesses who survived miraculously, people got crazy before the others’ eyes and became grey-haired in several minutes. Infants were torn out from their mothers and thrown alive to pits full of corpses. Babiy Yar is even more than just a place of monstrous genocide.
For more than twenty years tragedy of Babiy Yar was hushed up by Soviet authorities. The subject of the tragedy was under prohibition, and Soviet rhetoric confined itself to indistinct phrases about victims undergone by Soviet people without care about memory of specific people, nations, or social groups. There was a desire to destroy memory about Babiy Yar together with it. The common grave was turned into city dump. It was planned to built dancing ground, stadium, make a park on the place of execution of dozens thousand people. As a result, highway was laid on the place of Babiy Yar, and TV center and filling station were built there. But during all this time the attempts of few Soviet intellectuals to stop the blasphemy did not cease. In September 1961 a poem by Ye. Yevtushenko “Babiy Yar” was published that caused broadest public response and was used in 13th symphony by D. Shostakovich. In 1966 the first, though officious, monument to the dead was erected. In 1966 the narrative by Anatoly Kuznetsov “Babiy Yar” was published. Finally, in 1966 the first unofficial meeting of memory took place that assembled thousand people at least.
Mourning meetings became regular. They were banned by authorities, their participants could be subject to beating, arrests, and they were taken from trains. But this did not stop people who aspired to honor the memory of the dead and restore the terrible historical truth. So Babiy Yar became a place of truly ethnic self-consciousness for Jews and place of maturation and expression of spirit of true intellectuals.
But Babiy Yar is a place of not just mass executions of Jews that lasted for several days. From 1941 to 1943 patients of mental hospital were executed here as well as Soviet prisoners of war, several Gypsy bands, partisans, priests – totally, according to various calculations, from 70 to 200 thousand people. Thus, Babiy Yar became a common grave for people of various nations, various religions, social groups, beliefs reminding once again how frightful Nazism is and how important the universal memory about tragic past is.
And now, after many years of bureaucratic procrastination and departmental discords, on October 3 the ceremony of laying of first stone of memorial-museum complex “Babiy Yar” took place. The epochal event was participated by most famous rabbis, political leaders of Ukraine and Israel, representatives of many states, ambassadors of leading countries in Ukraine, biggest businessmen, public figures, and former prisoners of ghettos and concentration camps. Earlier, on September 30, a group of famous churchmen headed by patriarch Philaret held a public prayer in Babiy Yar. Such a representative meeting gives a base for hope that the world would remember about the tragedy.
Director of Moscow bureau for human rights Alexander Brod: “But this is not enough just to remember. We live during a wild outburst of xenophobia, chauvinism, and neo-Nazism. Every day we get reports about beatings and murders of people motivated by ethnic hatred, about vandalism at cemeteries. We hear monstrous reports how eggs are fried and even people are burned on Eternal flames. In Russia gangs of neo-Nazis are active. In Latvia legions of veterans-SS-members are marching. In Ukraine where thousands of the executed in Babiy Yar lie, titles of heroes are awarded and monuments are built to accomplices of Nazis and on May 9 St. George ribbons are torn off from veterans. And authorities suppress activity of heirs to fascism not actively enough and sometimes pay no attention to it. What happens 70 years after Babiy Yar makes not just remember but take energetic actions and fight. Fascism is not conquered yet”. |
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