Featured guest: Karel Berkhoff, Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Co-Project Director EHRI. Listen to the Podcast.
‘This book contains nothing but the truth.
Whenever I used to tell parts of the story to people they would always, without exception, declare that I ought to turn it all into a book.
[I have in fact been writing that book for many long years. What might be called the first version was written when I was only fourteen. In those days, when I was just a hungry, frightened little boy, I used to write down in a thick, home-made notebook everything I saw and heard and knew about Babi Yar as soon as it happened. I had no idea why I was doing it, it seemed to me to be something I had to do, so that nothing should be forgotten.’
These are the first haunting lines of Babi Yar. A Document in the Form of a Novel, by A. Anatoli (Anatoly Kuznetsov), published for the first time, in a heavily censored version, in 1966 in the Soviet Union.