Meditate che questo è stato:
Vi comando queste parole.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
Stando in casa andando per via,
Coricandovi alzandovi;
Ripetetele ai vostri figli.
O vi si sfaccia la casa,
La malattia vi impedisca,
I vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.
If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
Well-known and tired, these words, right?
Who knows how many times you’ve read them, I know…
The first time I read them was on my father's nightstand. An exotic and mysterious territory to which, as a little boy, I approached with the awe and liturgy reserved for a sacred place, a forbidden city whose entrance was not guarded by sentinels, but by a few scattered words, just turned past the cover of a book: "Meditate that this has been."
My father wasn't an avid reader, and he only had that book on his nightstand throughout my childhood.
As for me, I couldn't read more than the first page of the book. Hundreds of times. I had only sensed that it talked about something terrible, and beyond my reach.
"Meditate that this has been: I command you these words." The rhythm and authority of a biblical passage. Nice even the inversion, I realize at this precise moment: all of us would have written: "I command you these words: meditate that this has been."
Then, to conclude, the final curse. Three lines for three abominations, each worse than the last.
"Or your house will crumble, illness will impede you, your offspring will turn their faces from you."
And to say – I'll discover years later, reading that book – that in 214 pages Primo doesn't have a single word of condemnation for his tormentors. So much so that I still believe the man Levi wonders whether he can still be defined as such is not only the one who "works in the mud" and "fights for half a loaf," but also the executioner, who, drunk, in uniform and with "a hoarse laugh," strikes blows with a shovel on the defenseless workers.
Two sides of the same coin of dehumanization that Europe has pinned "with cemeteries of crosses on the chest."
No words of condemnation, I was saying. Yet Primo finds harsh words for those who do not engrave these words into their hearts, for those who do not repeat them to their children, lying down, getting up, staying at home, going out...
We haven't repeated them enough, to our children, I realize... And to the children of our children. And to the children of the children of our children. Otherwise, how to explain to Primo that in 2021 a city councilor, leader of one of Italy’s most voted parties, a former deputy, found it completely normal to post on Facebook against a Jewish senator – "guilty" of having pro-vaccine positions – by writing "She was missing… 75190".
Don’t tell me this review is long, please… Rather, tell me it’s ugly. Like, surprisingly, the curators of the Einaudi publishing house, Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese said about Levi’s manuscript. If you find it long, simply don’t read it. Move on. You have my personal dispensation. Dedicate yourself to something else. For example, understanding why one in two Italians believe that Holocaust Memorial Day is a good occasion to take advantage of unmissable discounts on Hard Disks, CD-ROMs, and USB pens.
But leave me alone. I simply need to put Primo's words into practice.
On September 28, 1941, over Kiev – only three months from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa and a few days after the fall of the city – a strong storm hit. It’s on those water-soaked walls, on the gates, in the streets, that an announcement appeared, printed on a poor-quality gray paper. It is a summons, but without title or signature. It’s written in Ukrainian, Russian, and German: “All Jews of the city of Kiev and its surroundings are required to appear Monday, September 29, 1941, at 8 in the morning at the corner of Mel’nikovkaja and Dochturovskaja streets (near the cemetery). Bring documents, money, valuables, and also warm clothes, underwear, etc.”
The city had fallen into German hands, after months of siege, on September 19 of the same year. Only ten days earlier. Enough time for the Einsatzgruppen – perhaps the most ruthless of the Nazi special units, commanded by the very young General Reinhard Heydrich – to find a way to plan the annihilation of the city’s Jewish inhabitants.
They took our hearts under a dark blanket
Under a dead little moon we slept without fear
A general of twenty years old
Blue eyes and identical jacket
A general of twenty years
Son of a thunderstorm.
In the short time that followed, the “fortunate” survivors were deprived of everything: civil rights, homeland, family, friends, food, real estate, dignity, and above all life. In a crescendo of unimaginable violence of which the Babij Yar pit was only the terrible prologue.
In 1939, 224,326 Jews lived in Kiev. In the census taken in 1942, only 20 remained.
But the land was taken from him
Including the one left on him
He was thrown into a palace, into a ditch
I don’t remember well
Then a story of chains, beatings
And experimental surgery
The ordinance of September 28, 1941, however, was interpreted as news, all in all, not too dramatic: a summons for a mass transfer to a provincial town. There was talk of a labor supply mobilization or the exchange of German prisoners of war for Jewish families. Until the German attack, Soviet newspapers overflowed with praise for Hitler, described as “The greatest friend of the Soviet Union,” while nothing of the dire situation of Jews in Germany and Poland reached the ears of Kiev’s Jews: no one had ever even heard of concentration camps and crematoria. The old Jews remembered the Germans of 1918, who, when they had been in Ukraine, hadn’t treated them badly, perhaps even due to the not too dissimilar language… All thus hopefully set out towards Menlik Street, the antechamber of the death abyss, some setting off while it was still dark, thinking they would thus be able to secure the best spots.
There is a girl crossing the scene, now.
Her name is Dina Mironovna Proničeva, and she is very young, even though she already has a husband and two children. And two elderly parents, who have decided to leave for the provincial city the Germans have chosen for them. She hasn’t. But she wants to raise her children there: she is Jewish, but her husband is Ukrainian. She would have accompanied her parents, seen them off at the train, but then she would have returned. That was her country.
And so, with her father and mother, she joins the crowd filling Turgenevskaja Street: people laden with luggage on their shoulders, others with carts, even trucks, on which sat hordes of cheerful children, while infants were transported two or three at a time in a single stroller.
They take the entire day to reach the indicated place... And there they don’t find trains, only an indescribable confusion: the Nazi soldiers, to keep warm, had lit large fires, around which roamed big German shepherds. And they drank, drank, drank.
No one understood what was happening. The only thing they understood was that there was no way of escape.
With Ukrainian collaborators, the Germans had created a corridor: two rows of soldiers, for a space of about one and a half meters, in which the military stood shoulder to shoulder, armed with truncheons or large sticks; Dina also passes there, under a barrage of blows. Around her, bodies, blood, soldiers’ laughter, screams, a poor spread of senseless luggage. An Ukrainian policeman strips her of her clothes, leaving her naked and bleeding, pushing her towards one of the bonfires lit around there. And her mother, forcibly dragged away by two soldiers, shouts, "Run, Dina! Save yourself... You don’t resemble…”
“A Jew,” she would have wanted to say. But she didn’t have the time.
While among the other naked
I crawl towards a fire
That lights up the ghosts
Of this obscene game.
How can I tell my mother that I'm scared?
Indeed Dina couldn't tell her mother that she was scared. She didn’t have the time, simply. As she didn’t have the time to run away.
“Schnell,” is the word that falls upon her, along with the usual barrage of baton blows, sticks, knuckle dusters. Then she and her unfortunate companions are taken in groups of ten to the edge of the precipice. On the opposite side of the ravine, Dina can spot some light machine guns, already ready, and hear the soldiers’ laughter. The children are torn from their mothers and thrown into the gorge like rag dolls, or tossed into the air and used as targets by the executioners, with the justification that the tender flesh of children wouldn't easily stop a bullet, risking dangerous ricochets on the ground.
When the shooting begins, Dina feels more than the machine gun shots; she feels the bodies of people around her falling into the abyss. And she hears the volley approaching. Dina looks down, and feels a sense of vertigo, more for the height than for the thousands of bodies already lying at the bottom of that precipice. When she hears the close blast of shots, Dina closes her eyes. And thinks, "Now is the moment!" And she throws herself into the void…
I saw Dina flying
Between the swing ropes
One day I will catch her
Like the wind does to the back
And if my father hears about it
I’ll have to move countries
Dina will be the only witness to come out alive from the Babij Yar hell. In a little over twenty-four hours, the Nazis will exterminate 33,771 people. Thirty-three thousand seven hundred seventy-one. One person every three seconds.
Dina fell onto the countless layers of bodies that the Nazis had arranged at the bottom of the gorge. This was the method of the Einsatzgruppen, widely tested in other similar actions at Ponary, Lithuania, Liepaja, and Rumbula in Latvia, Bronna Góra in Belarus, or Gurka Polonka in Ukraine itself: one layer of corpses was topped by another layer, and then another, and then another still.
It is estimated that, in the coming years, between 100,000 and 150,000 people found death at Babij Yar: Jews, prisoners of war, Ukrainian nationalists, Romani people, partisans, homosexuals, common thieves. Even players of Dynamo Kiev, who hadn’t wanted to lose to the German Army team.
The dust, the blood, the flies, the smell
On the street and among the fields, people dying
And you, you call it war and don't know what it is
And you, you call it war and can't explain why.
The evidence of that massacre remained buried under few layers of soil for a couple of years. On August 18, ’43, on the eve of the German retreat, the local SS chief, Paul Blobel, had 300 prisoners from the Syrec camp sent to the gorge to exhume with shovels and excavators the bodies of the victims. From the adjacent Jewish cemetery, tombstones and iron railings were uprooted and used as grills to burn the remains. They continued to incinerate Babij Yar's hundred thousand dead until September 28, managing to create pyres on which up to 3,000 bodies were piled and burned. Finally, the prisoners were forced with hammers and poles to crush the bones and scatter the dust along the ravine.
Men to whom pity does not always apply
Maladjusted to the common fate,
Go, in the evenings of November,
To spy the stars by faint light,
The death and the wind, amid cemeteries,
Move the tombs and set them close
As if they were giant tiles
Of a domino game that will never end.
And this is the second attempt to erase Babij Yar. Once the war ended, a third would arrive: the one enacted by Soviet censorship, functional to hide Ukrainian collaborationism and antisemitism, which had always lurked during Stalinism.
The soap merchants
Turned their bellies towards the east
Whoever converted in ninety
Was dispensed in ninety-one
The monkey of the Fourth Reich
Danced the polka on the wall
And as it climbed
We all saw its bottom.
In 1961, Evgenij A. Evtushenko, a twenty-nine-year-old poet, visiting Kiev for a reading evening, wanted to personally visit Babij Yar: the site had become a landfill and no commemorative symbols were placed in that place where thousands of people died. Shocked also by the very recent anti-Semitic raids that had set the country on fire – under the acronym BŽSP (an acronym of Bej židov, spasaj Rossiju, “Beat the Jews, save Russia,” a slogan inherited from the terrible pogroms of the czarist era) – he composed in a few hours the poem "Babij Yar," surprisingly managing to read it in the auditorium of the Moscow Polytechnic Museum, stirring up a political storm.
On Babij Jar, no monument
A steep slope: a solitary plaque untouched by chisel
I am afraid,
I am old, today,
Old as the Jewish people
And now, I believe, I am a Jew.
It was published – an endeavor considered impossible – by Valerij Kosolapov, editor-in-chief of the authoritative Literaturnaya Gazeta. A war veteran, he had the opportunity to see Babij Yar’s pit with his own eyes and, indifferent to the great danger he would run, said to Evtushenko: “I’m a communist, understand? How could I not publish it?”
The consequences weren’t long in coming: the very next day, the head of the Central Committee's Culture Section stormed the newspaper's offices to fire him, ideally supported by the voices of Soviet organic intellectuals, outraged that the poem remained silent on the suffering inflicted by the Nazis on the rest of the Soviet population and that it placed the infamy of antisemitism solely on them.
Thus, in the Soviet Union, everyone read Babij Yar: eminent scientists and workers, students and party leaders, housewives and, certainly, KGB agents. The reactions were extreme: some of admiration, others hated it. That edition of the Literaturnaya Gazeta was immediately sold out. In those days, private-use copying machines were prohibited, but Babij Yar was secretly copied in military complexes and government offices, with typewriters and by hand. On my machine, someone had engraved with a sharp point 'Jew.' The street police once stopped me telling me to move immediately because those insulting graffiti defaced Moscow's beauty.
Besieged by the heavy artillery of the censors, the walls of Evtushenko’s poem were about to give way. To reverse the battle's outcome is a telephone, doing its duty and ringing, in March '62, in a small Moscow apartment.
My wife Galina went to answer. She returned irritated: "You keep receiving absurd calls, someone just called claiming to be Shostakovich! I hate these impostors." The phone rang again, Galina went to answer once more. The person on the other end of the line gently said, "Excuse me, we don’t know each other, but I am actually Shostakovich. If you like, you can write down my number and check. Could you tell me if Evgeny Alexandrovich is at home?" […] “Dear Evgeny Alexandrovich, I read your Babij Yar poem, and it struck me deeply. Would you be kind enough to grant me the permission to compose a... I don't even know what to call it, a piece?"
“Of course, say no more! I would be thrilled!"
“Oh, I’m so grateful for your kind permission… And could you come to my house, say, now? This... piece, this piece... well, to tell the truth, it would be... ready, you see."
Evtushenko, needless to say, rushes to Shostakovich's house: "For me, it was like God calling from the sky. I remember we listened to his Leningrad Symphony during the war. In Zima, Siberia, where I was born, we had no radio in schools or at home. It was quite cold, but huge crowds of workers, women, and children listened outside, from big black speakers. The Leningrad inspired people during a very hard time."
Thus was born Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, extreme bulwark against oblivion, hypocrisy, pain, the meeting between a relatively unknown poet attacked from all sides and the greatest Soviet composer, who had grown accustomed to attacks over a lifetime: “Most of my symphonies are tombstones. Too many of our fellow citizens have died and been buried in places unknown to everyone, including relatives... I would like to write a symphony for each of the victims, but it's impossible, and that's why I dedicate all my music to them.”
After various additions and reworkings, the Thirteenth symphony consists of five movements, one for each of the brave poems that Evtushenko composed for the occasion: Adagio (“Babij Jar”), Allegretto (“Humor”) which mocks those who illusion themselves of controlling popular satire, Adagio (“In the Store”) which glorifies the endurance of Soviet women, Largo (“Fears”) on the anguish of expressing one’s opinion in Stalin’s era and, finally, Allegretto (“Career”) which predicts immortal fame only for those willing to defend their ideas.
Shostakovich entrusts the sparse words of the young poet to a bass soloist and a choir of basses, and to the mournful bells that introduce us to the pit of Babij Jar, accompanying us to the end of the movement, on the words “There is no monument at Babij Jar”; then the bass soloist, who tells us about the Jewish fate, from the flight from Egypt, to the Dreyfus Affair and the pogroms of Bialystok, after an heartfelt appeal to the Russian people: "O my dear nation, O Russia, you have always been internationalist. But how many times those with filthy hands brandished your pure name? I know the goodness of my land and how, without ever shivering, the antisemites proclaimed: "We are the Russian Nation!”
On Babij Yar, you hear the rustle of grass.
The trees are menacing, like judges.
Everything cries out in silence, and, uncovering my head,
I feel my hair slowly turning white.
And I become a continuous scream,
Over the thousands and thousands of people buried here.
I am every elder shot here.
I am every child shot here.
The public performance of the premiere was hampered by the Central Committee's pressures on the designated bass soloist and conductor, who ultimately withdrew from participation and were replaced in the imminence of the performance by the very young Vitaly Gromadskij and Kirill Kondrashin, respectively.
There was a second performance, and then executing the Symphony with the original lyrics was banned: none other than Nikita Khrushchev intervened personally, and Evtushenko agreed to make modifications to the text, placing Jews on the same level as other victims and casting a new light on the Soviet Union's role in defeating Nazism. He would explain, years later, that it seemed to him the only way to save the symphony, which, however, during the entire Soviet era, did not appear in any musical editions, with the catalog jumping from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth.
It's Babij Yar’s fate to witness every attempt at erasure. To have a Menorah at Babij Yar, it was necessary to wait until 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union. “This valley witnessed three terrible crimes. The first was the massacre, the obliteration of human beings. Then there was the concealment (the Germans' attempt to exhume the bodies and burn them at the time of retreat) and the denial, the attempts to erase the evidence and memory," Israeli President Isaac Herzog peremptorily stated in his speech for the 80th anniversary of Babij Yar just three months ago.
Today Babij Yar is an anonymous park, with children playing ball, parents setting up barbecues and drinking beers. And Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman, the main backer of the Babij Jar Holocaust Memorial Center, explaining: “Today people have to choose between thousands of forms of entertainment, we have to account for the future public’s mindset. Our competition is not other museums: it's Netflix.” Artistic director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, for his part, had proposed an algorithm that would identify roles for visitors based on their social profile, so they could “immersively” experience the massacre, as victims or perpetrators, using deep-fake video technology.
The deepest statement ever made about the Holocaust wasn't a statement at all, but a response. The question was: "Tell me, where was God at Auschwitz? And the answer: "Where was man?" – William Clark Styron
As for myself, believe me, I did what I could, Primo.
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