^{The site of the 1941 Babi Yar massacre, from the Emmanuel (Amik) Diamant Collection. Source: The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel.}

By Haim Ben Yakov

There are moments when the defense of Jewish memory does not depend only upon Jews.

This September offers an unusual reason to remember two such moments: Sept. 19 marks 65 years since Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem “Babi Yar.” Six days later comes the 120th anniversary of the birth of Dmitri Shostakovich. At the end of the month, we will mark 85 years since 33,771 Jews were murdered at Babi Yar on Sept. 29-30, 1941.

The dates belong together, and not simply because of the calendar. They tell us something about Jewish memory that remains important today: There are times when remembering the Jews requires the courage of non-Jews.

Yevtushenko and Shostakovich were a Russian poet and composer, respectively. Neither was Jewish. Neither was untouched by the compromises demanded by Soviet life. Yet each reached a point at which Jewish suffering ceased to be someone else’s concern. Their choice to speak out deserves to be remembered alongside the works they created.

The facts of Babi Yar were never simple abstractions. When German forces occupied Kyiv in September 1941, the city’s Jews were ordered to report to them with documents, money, valuables and warm clothing. Many believed they were being resettled. Instead, they were taken to Babi Yar.

On Sept. 29-30, German SS and police units, and their auxiliaries murdered 33,771 Jews at the site. We know the number from the perpetrators’ own reports.

The killing at Babi Yar did not end with the Jewish victims. Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, psychiatric patients and others were murdered at the site during the German occupation. All belong to its history.

But the first great massacre was directed against the Jews of Kyiv. They were not killed accidentally, or simply because they happened to be Soviet citizens living under German occupation. They were killed because they were Jews.

After the war, that elementary fact became increasingly uncomfortable in the Soviet Union. The victims of Babi Yar were absorbed into the official category of “peaceful Soviet citizens.” The description was technically correct, but historically evasive. The Jews of Kyiv were Soviet citizens, but Soviet citizenship was not why the Nazis murdered them.

This distinction matters enormously to Jewish memory. A person can be erased without their death being denied; it is enough to preserve the number while removing the identity.

For Soviet Jews, this was not an academic problem. Families knew whom they had lost. They knew why parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters had been taken away. Yet the public language available to describe those deaths increasingly refused to say what families knew privately. The state remembered the victims, but not quite as themselves.

Jewish memory, however, did not wait for official permission to remember. Long before Yevtushenko visited Babi Yar, survivors, relatives, writers and ordinary Jews had kept the memory alive. People visited the ravine. Families preserved photographs and letters. Stories passed from parents to children.

Writers and artists also tried to speak out. Ilya Ehrenburg, Lev Ozerov, Mykola Bazhan and others addressed the massacre. The Ukrainian Jewish composer Dmitri Klebanov dedicated his First Symphony to the martyrs of Babi Yar and paid a heavy professional price for doing so. Viktor Nekrasov repeatedly argued for a proper memorial. Anatoly Kuznetsov collected the testimony that would eventually become his documentary novel Babi Yar.

So, Yevtushenko did not discover Babi Yar. Nor did he create the Jewish memory of it. What he did was different: He made that memory extraordinarily difficult for Soviet public culture to ignore.

Yevtushenko visited Babi Yar in 1961. He was shocked by the absence of an adequate memorial and the neglect of the site. His poem “Babi Yar” appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta on September 19 of that year. Its famous opening declared that no monument stood above Babi Yar. But the deeper provocation was not about stone. It was about identity.

Yevtushenko placed Babi Yar within the history of antisemitism. The voice of the poem passes through the Dreyfus affair, a child in a pogrom, Anne Frank and the Jews murdered outside Kyiv. Then something remarkable happens: A Russian poet imaginatively places himself among them.

The significance of that gesture can be difficult to understand today. Soviet antisemitism had often placed Jews in a position in which even discussing Jewish persecution can be regarded as an expression of Jewish particularism or nationalism. Thus, the burden of explaining antisemitism was left largely to those who suffered from it.

Yevtushenko refused that arrangement. He was saying, in effect: You do not have to be Jewish for antisemitism to become your problem.

This did not make him Jewish, and it did not give him ownership of Jewish suffering. Solidarity is not appropriation. It is the decision to accept that another person’s persecution creates an obligation for you as well.

The reaction to the poem showed why that distinction mattered. Yevtushenko was attacked for supposedly privileging Jewish suffering over that of Russians, Ukrainians and other Soviet peoples. But naming the Jews murdered at Babi Yar did not diminish anybody else’s suffering. It restored to memory the reason why those particular people had been selected for death.

The accusation itself revealed how far the problem had gone. Simply naming Jewish suffering could be presented as an act of Jewish exclusivity, even when the person doing the naming was not Jewish at all.

"A person can be erased without their death being denied"

Then, Dmitri Shostakovich read Yevtushenko’s poem and decided to set it to music. For him, the Jewish theme was not new. Jewish musical idioms had appeared in his work before, and in 1948, during one of Stalin’s most threatening campaigns against Jewish cultural life, he had composed From Jewish Folk Poetry.

But his Thirteenth Symphony made the confrontation public on another scale. Shostakovich combined “Babi Yar” with four other Yevtushenko poems. The symphony became a meditation not only on antisemitism but on fear, conformity, humiliation, careerism and the moral compromises of Soviet life.

The first movement remains its center of gravity. A bass voice sings Yevtushenko’s words. A male chorus enters. An orchestra gives them a weight that a newspaper page could never possess.

On Dec. 18, 1962, the symphony was premiered in Moscow, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin. The political pressure surrounding the work was considerable. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev criticized Yevtushenko and later altered lines of the poem to give greater emphasis to Russian and Ukrainian victims. Shostakovich accepted the substitution of eight revised lines in later performances, while his manuscript preserved the original text.

It would be easy to tell this story as a morality play populated by heroes and villains, but real life under dictatorship is rarely so generous. Yevtushenko made compromises with the Soviet system; so did Shostakovich. Scholars still debate aspects of both men’s political biographies. That does not cancel what happened at Babi Yar.

Neither man was required by his identity to take this risk. They could have regarded antisemitism as somebody else’s problem. They did not.

Today, the question of who is responsible for dealing with antisemitism is again uncomfortably relevant. When antisemitism rises, much of the responsibility for confronting it still falls automatically upon Jews. Jewish organizations issue statements. Jewish researchers collect evidence. Jewish parents worry about their children. Jewish students explain why a slogan or image carries a history that others may prefer not to recognize.

There is something wrong with this division of labor. The people targeted by prejudice obviously have a particular voice in describing it. But they cannot bear the primary responsibility for persuading society that their persecution matters.

Antisemitism is directed at Jews, but responsibility for opposing it belongs to everyone. Yevtushenko understood this in his way. Shostakovich understood it in his. Their example helps clarify what solidarity should mean.

Solidarity does not require pretending that all historical experiences are identical. It does not ask a non-Jew to speak over Jews, or to turn Jewish history into a stage for his own virtue. It begins more modestly: by listening, naming what happened accurately and refusing to remain morally neutral because the victim belongs to another group.

This is especially important when doing so has a cost. There is little courage in opposing an antisemitism already condemned by everyone around us. The more difficult moment comes when antisemitism appears inside a political movement, cultural environment or social group with which we otherwise identify.

Then the temptation is to explain it away. We discover context. We argue about terminology. We insist that the speaker surely meant something else. We become much more demanding about evidence than we would be if the same language came from our political opponents.

The history of Babi Yar suggests why this is dangerous. The Soviet Union did not need to deny that tens of thousands of people had been murdered. It merely needed a language in which the particular identity of the principal victims became less important than the political story the state wanted to tell. Memory survived because people refused to accept that bargain.

There is an old anxiety surrounding Jewish memory: that insisting on the particularity of Jewish suffering somehow separates Jews from the rest of humanity. Babi Yar demonstrates the opposite. The 33,771 people murdered there must be remembered as Jews precisely because that is why they were murdered.

Remembering them accurately does not require forgetting the Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, psychiatric patients and others who were later murdered at the same site. There is no competition of dignity among the dead. But neither is there dignity in making them interchangeable.

A universal lesson that can be reached only by removing the victim’s identity is not genuinely universal. It asks the dead to become anonymous before the living agree to mourn them.

Yevtushenko and Shostakovich offered another possibility. They did not have to become Jewish to recognize the Jewish character of the tragedy. They did not have to claim Jewish memory as their own to defend its right to exist. They simply refused to regard it as foreign.

That distinction seems to me increasingly valuable.

The temptation on anniversaries is always to turn memory into ceremony. We recite numbers, unveil plaques, play music, quote familiar words and then return to ordinary life. But the encounter between Babi Yar, Yevtushenko and Shostakovich asks something more difficult. It asks what we do when the people being singled out are not members of our own family, faith or nation.

For Jews, there is gratitude in remembering two non-Jewish artists who understood that question at a difficult time. For everyone else, perhaps, there is an invitation. You do not have to inherit another people’s memory to help protect it. You do not have to share the victim’s identity before their persecution becomes your concern.

Sometimes, solidarity begins with something much simpler: the realization that someone else’s dead must still be allowed to have their own name.

Source: JNS