A stunning documentary recalls the many times Babyn Yar was forgotten
Babyn Yar in Sergei Loznitsa’s film “Babi Yar. Context.” Courtesy of Film Forum
By PJ Grisar March 29, 2022
On March 1, Russian forces bombed Babyn Yar, downing a television tower and killing five people. Despite initial reports, the memorial there – commemorating the 1941 murder of 33,771 Jews – wasn’t hit. But fears that it would become collateral damage are supported by history.
For decades, the Babyn Yar ravine, also known as Babi Yar, has been at the mercy of regimes that preferred to bury the two-day massacre that occurred there, rather than memorialize it. In the 1950s, brick factories filled it with industrial waste. Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote in the 1960s that “Over Babi Yar there are no monuments,” and, when one finally arrived in the 1970s, it did not mention that the site’s first victims – before it became the killing grounds for tens of thousands more prisoners of war, Jews and Roma – were killed for being Jewish. Even now, in the post-Soviet era, with a menorah-shaped memorial long established, one can find Twitter videos of children sledding on the mass grave.
As a child, filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa used to ramble through Babyn Yar – roughly five miles outside Kyiv – on his way back from a swimming pool, past fragments of Jewish headstones from the abandoned Jewish cemetery. One day he saw a stone announcing the future monument to fallen “Soviet citizens.” When he asked his parents what happened there, they didn’t give him a direct answer. In his documentary “Babi Yar. Context,” which opens April 1 at Film Forum, Loznitsa shows us.
Drawing from amateur film shot by Nazi soldiers, testimony filmed by American journalists and footage of a 1946 trial of the perpetrators, Loznitsa lives up to his title: The context is here, and not just the two days in September, when the Einsatzgruppe, assisted by Ukrainian police, decimated much of Ukraine’s Jewish population.
We’re shown the Nazi invasion of Lviv, where troops were greeted with flowers and cheers as Stalin’s banner was torn down. We see the smoldering rubble of homes, the columns of displaced people, the children filling sandbags for a barricade in soon-to-be besieged Kyiv. This prelude, in which Jews are first brutalized in the street by fascist-sympathizing Ukrainian militias, and Nazis are welcomed as liberators, quietly explains the conditions for what’s to come. Before the Jews are gathered at the cemetery in Kyiv, to meet their own mass grave, we see the wide ditch being prepared for them.
Loznitsa shows us arresting archival footage, supplemented with sound design – coughing, shuffling, the odd bit of crowd noise and the eerie whistling of the wind – but some of the most shocking images are static ones: an edict ordering the “Yids” to exit the city; a quote from a local newspaper calling the forced exodus “a great day for the city of Kyiv.”
Instead of familiar images of the shootings, with mounds of naked bodies at the foot of the ravine, snapshots of shoes and clothes and a prosthetic leg linger on the screen, as does Vasily Grossman’s elegiac text “Ukraine Without Jews,” which begins “In Ukraine there are no Jews.” Grossman’s words scroll on the screen for over two minutes, inviting us to process the sheer scale of the loss.
Loznitsa – who recently withdrew from the European Film Academy over its tepid response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine – doesn’t stop when the Germans leave. He showcases the Red Army’s recapture of Kyiv. The same crowd that danced in traditional garb and pasted Hitler’s face on streetcars now happily meets the Soviets, hammering off German language street signs and chiseling Nazi propaganda off of buildings. The message is clear: a crowd can be influenced. Instead of a speech from Nazi officials, they hear Soviet ones. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss – only not quite.
In chilling testimony from a 1947 trial, we see the Soviets holding the Nazis accountable. One SS officer provides a clinical account of how he shot 120 people with a machine gun. A non-Jewish woman who survived by playing dead, details her escape from a shallow grave with a Jewish teenager. 12 Nazi perpetrators face justice, and witness their public hanging, Kyiv’s last public execution.
What we don’t see are consequences for the many Ukrainians who collaborated – and the many more, who, concerned for their own standing in a brutal occupation, let their neighbors march to their death. One imagines they lived on and, either due to shame or Soviet diktats, never spoke of what happened.
Loznitsa’s film breaks a long silence, unearthing rare and unseen footage and striving to overcome what he calls “chronicide.”
In a startling development, Loznitsa learned that the subject is still taboo for some. On March 19th, he was expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy for refusing to back a categorical boycott on Russian culture. Another factor for his removal, he believes, was this film about Nazi crimes, which might upset today’s nationalists by implicating Ukrainians from over 80 years ago.
“The ‘honorable academy members’ had a very different perception of Ukrainian history, which they claim they know better than anyone.” Loznitsa told The Guardian, later adding that there are images from the film – perhaps the helpless people, carnage and war by an expansionist aggressor – that “remind us of the images of Ukraine we see on TV screens today.”
Loznitsa’s view of history is clear-eyed, showing where nationalism always leads. His challenge to his country, in throwing light on a dark corner of its past, should be seen for what it is: an act of patriotism.
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