Babi Yar Book

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.

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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.