Babi Yar : the long suppressed version of the complete and uncensored text of the great Russian novel of World War II

An internationally acclaimed documentary novel that describes the fateful collision of Russia, Ukraine, and Nazi Germany, and one of the largest mass executions of the Holocaust ?I wonder if we will ever understand that the most precious thing in this world is a man's life and his freedom? Or is there still more barbarism ahead? With these questions I think I shall bring this book to an end. I wish you peace. And freedom. At the age of 12, Anatoly Kuznetsov experienced the Nazi invasion of Ukraine, and soon began keeping a diary of the brutal occupation of Kiev that followed. Years later, he combined those notebooks with other survivors? memories to create a classic work of documentary witness in the form of a novel. When Babi Yar was first published in a Soviet magazine in 1966, it became a literary sensation, not least for its powerful and unprecedented narratives of the Nazi massacre of the city's Jews, and later Roma, prisoners of war, and other victims, at the Babi Yar ravine--one of the largest mass killings of the Holocaust. After Kuznetsov defected to Great Britain in 1969, he republished the book in a new edition that included extensive passages censored by Soviets, and later reflections. In its fully realized form, Babi Yar is a classic of Holocaust and World War II testimony. With sustained immediacy, it relates a scrappy but principled boy's day to day fight to survive, and provide for his family. He dodges bullets and transport to Germany, befriends black market horse dealers and prerevolutionary aristocrats, wonders at the pomp of the Nazi's opera performances, overhears his mother and grandparents debate the merits of German and Soviet rule, collects grenades, digs hiding places, and confronts the moral dilemmas of assisting neighbors or looting stores--all the while hearing the constant hum of bullets at the Babi Yar ravine nearby. In a bravura feat of reporting, he tells the story of what happened at Babi Yar? from the deceptive roundup of the city's Jews and execution of the national soccer team to the memoires of the site's few survivors, and the story of a daring escape. The book's once-censored passages explore the Soviet effort to hide the realities of the massacre, and other facts about wartime the regime did not want discussed. In the manner of Elie Wiesel's Night or The Diary of Anne Frank , here is a book that tells some of the most uncomfortable truths of the past century --and the most essential Babi Yar is a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev and a site of massacres carried out by German forces and by local Ukrainian collaborators during their campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place 29-30 September 1941, killing 33,771 Jews. This book records the author's experience under the Nazis in the Ukraine. Anatoli was 12 years old in 1941 when the Germans occupied Kiev. Beginning with seventy thousand Jews, they proceeded to murder hundreds of thousands of the city's population in the ravine of Babi Yar, and deported thousands more to Germany for slave labor. Anatoli survived two incredible years of slaughter, terror, and starvation. As the Soviet Army approached from the East, the Nazis began their frantic and methodical attempt to erase the evidence of their crimes at Babi Yar. Anatoli first published the book Babi Yar about these atrocities in the Soviet Union in 1966, however the book was censored by the Soviets so the sense of the book was distorted and many original passages deleted. Anatoli escaped to the West in 1969, smuggling out of Russia films of his uncensored manuscripts. This book is an uncensored version of Babi Yar. It shows far more than anti-German sentiments, the oppression and persecution he so movingly documents is as much Soviet as Nazi. -- Publisher description Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel is an internationally acclaimed documentary novel by Anatoly Kuznetsov about the Babi Yar massacre. The two-day murder of 33,771 Jewish civilians on September 29-30, 1941 in the Kiev ravine was one of the largest single mass killings of the Holocaust. The novel begins as follows: "Everything in this book is true. When I recounted episodes of this story to different people, they all said I had to write the book. The word document in the subtitle of this novel means that I have provided only actual facts and documents without the slightest literary conjecture as to how things could or must have happened."