Ravine of the Dead

BABI YAR by Anatoly Kuznetsov. 399 pages. Dial. $5.95.

It was September, 1941, and victorious Nazi armies were pouring into Russia. Toward the end of the month, the Germans ordered "all Jews of the city of Kiev and its environs" to assemble near the Jewish cemetery overlooking a ravine called Babi Yar (Old Wives Gully). They came, locking their homes behind them and carrying their valuables, believing they were to be resettled beyond the war zone. Instead, they were marched to the cliffs of Babi Yar, stripped and machine-gunned in groups of ten. By the Germans' own orderly bookkeeping, 33,771 were slaughtered in the first 48 hours.

All told, about 200,000 victims filled the vast natural grave of Babi Yar--Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, workers, even a local soccer team that imprudently defeated an all-star German army eleven. Such ultimate impartiality made it possible for postwar Soviet policy, with its own vein of antiSemitism, to try to suppress the Jewish portion of the Babi Yar massacre--until 1961, when Poet Evgeny Evtushenko memorialized the Kiev Jews in burning verse. He was rebuked by the Soviet literary Establishment, but his own rebuke, in the poem's first two lines, was lastingly effective:

No monument stands over Babi Yar.

A drop sheer as a crude gravestone . . . Patterns of Horror. Evtushenko's "Babi Yar" helped create a Soviet climate in which this Babi Yar, "a documentary novel," could be published last fall in Russia, where it was widely read and acclaimed. The first full-length account for Russians of Kiev's years under the German occupation, Babi Yar is fictional only in narrative form, not fact. Novelist Kuznetsov, a gentile, was twelve years old when the Nazis arrived; he spent the next two years in Kiev discovering war and deprivation along with his own manhood. He has taken his personal story and added to it interviews with Babi Yar's few survivors and facts from official Soviet records.

The result is a stinging book that not only documents Kiev murders but also describes in detail the microcosm of a boy's world dissolving into unspeakable and incomprehensible patterns of horror. Each day was a constant obsession with the search for a crust of bread, the feverish reading of newspapers and posted orders for fresh fiats, since a nuance missed meant death.

Part of a System. Kuznetsov seems refreshingly careless about which official toes he steps on, and there is hardly a stereotyped opinion--or character--in the book on either side. His grandfather is pictured as first looking forward to the Nazi reign with something like enthusiasm, since he had never forgiven the Communists for robbing him "of his dream of getting rich" as "an entrepreneur." And although hatred for the Germans seethes through nearly every page, Kuznetsov also renders faithfully the few encounters with Germans who showed him or his family any kindness.

What puzzled the boy in 1941 continues to haunt the man. In pain and bewilderment, he concludes with a chilling warning aimed at all the latent violence in human beings everywhere: "Let me emphasize again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today."

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