When I was in Bible college there was a student who came to our school who had escaped from Uganda during Idi Amin's reign of butchery. I have forgotten his name, but not his story. His village (and family) had been wiped out, but he managed to survive by hiding under a pile of dead bodies until dark and then running away through the forest.This memory was unearthed by a Facebook entry I read last night, that today is the anniversary of Babi Yar.
Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukraine where one of the world's greatest atrocities occurred. On September 29 and 30 more than 33,000 Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis in a single event. The massacre has been acknowledged as "the largest single mass killing for which the Nazi regime and its collaborators were responsible during its campaign against the Soviet Union and is considered to be 'the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust.'"
While reading about this tragedy many recollections came to mind. One of these was an anecdote from the book Hotel Rwanda in which the narrator saw the shipments of machetes arriving in advance of the slaughter there. In other words, slaughters on this scale require organization.
At Babi Yar, there must have likewise been a significant orchestration of weapons, deceit and bulldozers, for in the end the whole thing was to be buried. That there were at least three known survivors is itself astonishing. One of these tells how she had to play dead in the midst of the dead bodies which were ultimately buried. She somehow managed to dig herself out afterwards, sharing her story in a documentary novel about this dark stain in history.
The important thing about recalling these perpetrated horrors is that they can prompt us to study history and help us recognize the circumstances which brought them about. Perhaps, too, there was no outrage because people did not know the extent to which it was happening. Or, the power of fear silenced those who were aware.
Our Founding Fathers had more than one thing right: the importance of a free press and freedom of speech.
Here is a place to learn more about Babi Yar. Let's not forget...
