Reviews for Babi Yar

The average rating for Babi Yar based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-05-31 00:00:00 Andrea Pompilio If I could change one thing about this book, I would wish it to be fiction. I read D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel in college, in which an execution is described based on the true tale of Babi Yar. When I saw a tattered paperback of Babi Yar at a secondhand shop, I picked it up and it sat on my shelf for years. It tells the story of the Nazi occupation of Kiev from the point of view of the author, who does his best to recapture his 12-year-old innocence (hiding with his cat in the bomb shelter, the joy he takes in joining in the looting, or collecting spent artillery shells with his friends) and how that innocence is lost over the following 778 days. It is a very human story of an inhuman struggle. The horrors of Babi Yar I do not wish to even attempt to describe; Kuznetsov's description should be sufficient for a lifetime. This would be a good companion to John Hersey's Hiroshima both as historical documents of how WWII affected civilians and reminders of the atrocities that humans inflict upon one another.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-09-05 00:00:00 Sean Woods One of the greatest crimes in History made into an eternal document through masterful technique, blending personal experience, reportage, survivor testimonies, and so on. May such books never have to be written. * Holodomor (a poem) 1. The paleness of the starved reached incandescence. In a cauldron, a ten year old hand. In Moscow the wife kills herself and the sky is painted in bands of red. He does think, he does, whether an idea can be pyrhhic. 'What does this country need, comrades? 'Comrades this country needs sacrifice.' 2. Images in search results: pale starvation, incandescence. Kuznetsov talked of a cauldron with a ten year old hand inside. We know the wife had killed herself. We can picture the sky painted in bands of red. We don't know if he ever ceased to do, ever paused, ever thought about it all. Today Žižek likes talking about his style, his habit of taking both sides of a catechism: 'What does this country need, comrades? 'Comrades this country needs ______' Also his pleasure in forcing credulity in the incredible, like the story of the dozen partridges who wouldn't move till the dictator could return after picking his forgotten bullets. 3. Kuznetsov talked of a cauldron with a ten year old hand. It could have been a twelve year old hand. When Kuznetsov talked of a cauldron with a ten year old hand, he was paraphrasing his Bolshevik father's experience as an enforcer and witness. Kuznetsov talked of a cauldron with a ten year old hand in his book 'Babi Yar.' Babi Yar is a ravine near the city of Kiev. Babi Yar is a ravine near the city of Kiev where thirty three thousand seven hundred and seventy one people were shot dead in two days by the Nazis. The cauldron with the ten year old hand, the Holodomor, came before before Babi Yar. More than five million perished in Holodomor. There is something in the names of catastrophes.