Babi Yar

Babi Yar is the name of a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, where between 1941 and 1943 the Nazis murdered untold numbers of Jews, Roma, the disabled, Ukrainian resisters and hostages. Anatoly Kuznetsov was a boy at the time, and lived with his grandparents in a house nearby: the ravine would give him the title, and the central focus, of the book in which he attempted to make sense of the experiences of occupation, genocide and survival. Vivid reminiscences of a childhood spent under brutal occupation are interspersed with others' experiences of Babi Yar and the mechanism of slaughter of which it was a part. Kuznetsov flits between these two strands, digressing, speculating, lamenting and admonishing in ways that are sometimes almost playful - such as a list entitled 'Reasons why I should have been shot'. Sprawling and painfully sincere, Babi Yar is a deeply personal attempt to come to terms with an atrocity that its author knows will never be quite comprehensible.