Kiev: city of my ancestors
Part of the reason for going to Kiev was to trace my family. While I was in Moscow and St Petersburg, I had found out a lot about my great-grandparents Doba and Iosef from my relatives. I found out that Doba died in the famine of 1933, that Iosef died in 1941, the year the Nazis invaded Kiev. That my family lived in Podil, the Jewish area of Kiev, that they moved there from Brovary, about 20 minutes out of town, when my grandfather was about four years old.
Walking around Kiev was intense. I went and found a street corner where I was told my grandparents lived. It looked like nothing special, and certainly nothing like it would have looked when they lived there, but sitting in a cafe there and eating pickles made me want to cry.
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| ^^ A statue to the victims of the 1933 famine, outside St Michael's. |
^^ The road down to Podil, the Jewish quarter. Did my great-grandmother walk this road? I had a lovely meal at a little cafe on the right. |
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| ^^ I thought I'd taken more photos of this... Kiev Botanical gardens, where my great-grandfather apparently took his daily walks. |
^^ The stunning Dniepr River. My father says my grandfather swam in this river as a child. |
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| ^^ And then, Babiy Yar. I'd read about it as a child. I'd written poetry about Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem about it. |
^^ But nothing prepared me for this. For knowing there are more than 100,000 bodies under that green grass. |
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<< As I stepped onto the uneven steps towards the statue, I began to sob uncontrollably. For the meaninglessness of death and the cruelty in the world, for my great-grandfather I'd never known, for every person who has ever been killed in war, for every person ever persecuted because of their faith. |
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| ^^ From the front, the statue is twisted souls, falling into the abyss. It is hard not to imagine the people being shot here and falling into the pit on top of screaming, living corpses. Thousands and thousands of people in the space of a few days. |
^^ From the back, the statue is a little easier to deal with. instead it is the ghosts of the people themselves who haunted me. Each step was a step they had taken that day, towards death. The plaques are in Hebrew, German and Ukrainian. |
Brovary, my grandfather's birthplace >>>
