2023-07-28 18:43:46
In just two days, from September 29 to 30, 1941, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Nazi occupation army that had invaded Ukraine shortly before executed, according to its own data, 33,771 men, women and children of Jewish origin, in the infamous Babi Yar ravine, on the outskirts of the city of Kiev. That massacre, considered one of the greatest mass murders of the Shoah, is the focus of the extraordinary film Babi Yar. Context, by the Ukrainian documentary filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, which will be seen for the last time this Saturday at 4:30 p.m. at the Gaumont Cinema, within the framework of the FIC.UBA festival.
Notable filmmaker, author of an unusual body of work, which includes essential titles such as Maidan (2014) and Austerlitz (2016), Loznitsa –who was honored last Monday with an Honoris Causa Doctorate from the UBA- built Babi Yar. Context in the same way that he had already made his two previous masterpieces, El proceso (2018) and Funeral de Estado (2019): using only archive material, without going to interviews or talking heads, but trusting in the eloquence of the images of the time (meticulously restored) and the narrative power of the montage, which he himself was in charge of together with his regular editor, the Lithuanian virtuoso Danielius Kokanauskis.
As its title indicates, Babi Yar. Context -which had its world premiere at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival- is not limited to those two macabre days, of which there are no images of any kind, but rather contextualizes the massacre beginning in June 1941, with the German invasion to Soviet Ukraine, and ending in December 1952, when that immense mass grave that was Babi Yar became the foundations of a brand-new complex of popular housing in the suburbs of Kiev, without any mention of what had happened on that property. .
The bombardment of a bridge and the columns of fire and smoke that rise to the sky -and which today acquire a shocking relevance- give an account of the entry of the Nazi troops through the Polish border, while in the capital the street loudspeakers report what happened and they promise the resistance of the Red Army, which begins to fence off the city with the help of women and children. It is very impressive, however, to see what was happening in Lvov (now Lviv), the most important city in western Ukraine, when German commanders are greeted as liberators, with cheers and applause, while Ukrainian civilian militias, armed with clubs, they go on the hunt for Jewish citizens, accused of collaboration with the Soviet secret police (NKVD), in turn executing alleged traitors, before their departure from the city.
Aware of the ethical limits imposed by documentary film, Loznitsa does not omit the most violent and humiliating images he encountered from that moment, but to avoid sensationalism he reduces them to brief slow-motion flashes, capable of giving an idea of the monstrosity of the situation without wallowing in it. His edition also does not exclude a demonstration headed by posters calling for a “Long live Stepan Bandera”, the historic Ukrainian nationalist leader today claimed by the sinister Azov Battalion and other far-right groups. In turn, Loznitsa collects images of the destruction of kyiv when the Nazi army had already entered the city and the Russians remotely detonated a series of bombs that caused civilian casualties.
“Some of the images I work with have been buried in the archives for decades, no one has ever seen them,” Loznitsa explained at the Babi Yar presentation. Context at the European Film Academy. “Not even historians, specialized in the Holocaust in the USSR. One such episode was the Kreschatik explosions in September 1941. Kiev’s central street was mined with remote-controlled explosives by the NKVD (Soviet secret service) before the Red Army withdrew from Kiev. The detonations of the explosives took place a few days following the Germans took the city. There were civilian casualties and thousands were left homeless. The Soviets, who planted the bombs, did not consider the human casualties and mass destruction as a significant factor in their military planning.
In response to those explosions that devastated the center of the city in September 1941, the Germans decided to exterminate kyiv’s Jewish population. The film tackles the core of its subject in a masterful way. First, it records the proclamation by which the Jews were ordered to report to the Nazi authority, which stated: “All Yids from the city of Kiev and its surroundings must appear on Monday, September 29, at 8 in the morning in the corner of Mel’nikova and Dokterivskaya streets (near the Viis’kove cemetery). They must bring documents, money and valuables, as well as warm clothes, bedding, etc. Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot.”
Then, a brief plaque from the film itself states that on September 29 and 30, 1941, Einsatzgruppe C (one of the special roving execution squads formed by Nazi Germany), with the help of the Ukrainian police, and without any resistance, by the civilian population, executed 33,771 Jews with bullets. It is followed by a silent sequence -without music or sound of any kind- with still color photos of the clothes and belongings that were left in the ravine of those executed, many of them children and disabled people. A quote from a Kiev newspaper reports that on October 5 “life returns to normal” in the city, with new deportations to the ravine of death, “in compliance with the wishes of the Ukrainian population.” Finally, an extensive, shocking text by the Judeo-Ukrainian writer Vasili Grossman is read, dated November-December 1943, which states that “in Ukraine there are no more Jews…”
That is the turning point of Babi Yar. Context, but not exactly the endpoint of it. The images that Loznitsa recovered from different public and private archives show that -symmetrically- in Kiev in November 1943 and Lvov in July 1944, the Soviet troops that retake control of the cities are received with the same jubilation and protocol with which two years before the Nazis had been feted. Now civilians tear down Hitler’s posters as they used to tear down Stalin’s.
The epilogue records the testimonies of the very few survivors -among them the actress Dina Pronicheva- and that of some of the Nazi perpetrators, who were hanged in January 1946 in a public square. “The whole scene has a very medieval feel to it. Or, perhaps, biblical: ‘an eye for an eye’…”, wrote Loznitsa. And the ending might not be more bleak, when at the end of 1952 the Babi Yar ravine was filled with industrial waste to build a monoblock complex there. “With my cinema, I study dehumanization, the loss of humanity by human beings,” said Loznitsa, who last year continued his work with On the Natural History of Destruction. But that’s another movie, and another story.
Babi Yar. Context will be seen this Saturday 29 at 4:30 p.m. and On the natural history of destruction on Sunday 30 at 4 p.m., both at the Gaumont Cinema.
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