Jonathan Littell, author of the acclaimed "Gracious," talks to Paulina Malochleb about the memory of the 1941 massacre in the Babi Yar suburban town of Konya, Bucza, fascism, empty signs of national identification and his latest book, "A Troublesome Place," which has just been published in Poland.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
Paulina Malochleb: The trip to Babi Yar and Bucha are not the first expeditions to sites of ethnic cleansing for you. Previously there was Bosnia and Sierra Leone, and from the war zones - Chechnya and Syria. What are some of the leads you are following?.
Jonathan Littell: I don't feel that I'm most interested in cleansing, but rather in the violence that leads to it, because it's never individual, domestic, criminal violence, but systemic violence - often state, social, involving entire ethnic or national groups. I didn't think I would return to Babi Yar yet, but my friend Antoine d'Agata (photographer and co-author of the book - editor's note) invited me to this project. Besides, shortly before the outbreak of war, a memorial center was opened in Babi Yar - I wanted to see how the place was changing.
In "Troublesome Places" a full two pages is an enumeration of monuments and other structures commemorating the murdered - each group of victims is mentioned, but at the same time we get the impression that these monuments abolish their significance, erase each other. All that is left is the memory of a competing memorial. .
There are many memorials to those murdered in death and concentration camps - such as Auschwitz. However, there is no memorial whose task is to remind people of what happened on the ground, which was the work of, for example, the Einsatzgruppen. That was precisely the task of Babi Yar, that was what it was supposed to remind people of. Meanwhile, today everyone wants a piece of the place for themselves, as evidenced not only by the shrines and monuments at Babi Yar, but also by the fact that there is now talk in Kyiv of establishing a memorial to the current war at the site. The government plans to create the kind of memorial that will accommodate both the genocide of 1941, perpetrated by the Germans, and that of today, perpetrated by the Russians.
Why in Babi Yar and not, for example, in Bucza? .
I don't know, but I can see that Babi Jar has become a vehicle for completely different memories and interpretations of memory, an object of significance for completely contradictory interest groups and policies: the best proof is the fact that we can find there both a monument to the murdered Jews and a monument to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
Is this fragmentation of memory the fruit of a poor knowledge of history? Or is it still the result of nationalist manipulation by communism? .
In Poland, during the communist regime and strong national anti-Semitism, you created strong institutions whose task was to commemorate. Auschwitz, although called differently at the time and serving more to commemorate German violence, was very quickly built by the state as a memorial center, so it was done in a very coordinated way. I'm not saying it's great, I'm just saying that this task was accomplished. The state took over the camp site, created a museum there with a budget and work stations.
In Ukraine such a process did not take place? .
No, the communist authorities flooded the ravines of Babi Yar with sewage from a nearby factory to level the area, to cover the mass graves. In fact, Babi Jar as the space where the massacre took place was completely destroyed. It is not easy to reconstruct its original formation today. In the post-Soviet period, the government was too weak, too unorganized, and had many other problems in the 1990s and 2000s to worry about Holocaust remembrance, so the site was left to private initiative.
The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was the latest in a long series of such initiatives attempting to create something worthy at the site. With better funding, more organized, it probably could have succeeded had the war not stopped the process. But the chaos of Babi Yar is very specifically related to Soviet history, to the rejection of the memory of the massacre of Jews as Jews, but also to Soviet poverty or the various memories of the Holocaust in Ukraine. And what I describe in the book is the result of these historical conditions.
What do Babi Yar and Bucza have in common in your view? .
First of all, both are now suburbs of Kyiv. At first I had no thesis, no conviction that these are similar places. Only in the course of wandering around them did I discover that both act like metonymy - they are tangential to each other, close not only literally. In both we witnessed the murder of people who were considered by a certain group to be excluded, inferior, to be liquidated. However, Bucza was not a place of systemic, industrial murder, as happened in Babi Yar. Bucza is very ad hoc, absolutely unsystematic in its methods and reasons for murder. Rather, it's a convergence of factors, actors - officers ordering to shoot at moving vehicles, or soldiers who murder for pleasure, as I described in the case of the girl they shot in the cellar for preserves after raping her for several days.
These are simply criminal crimes, made all the easier by the fact that the Russian army does not care about ethical standards and does nothing to stop such behavior by its army. So there was no plan in Bucha, instead a certain culture of killing cultivated by the Russians, combined with fear and a desire to retaliate, as Ukrainian forces successfully repelled Russian attacks there.
You are describing a modern war and a modern society, whose suffering and grief are being taken out into the public eye, foreign journalists are everywhere. However, not much comes of it.
I came to Bucza about 4-5 weeks after the liberation, when I was looking for traces of events, witnesses, I was part of a long chain of journalists. I had such a situation that I ended up near the house of a woman whose part of her family had been shot in the street in Bucza. She didn't want to talk to me, because I was just another journalist, another person trying to document what happened to her. She didn't have the strength to talk to me, she refused to call out over the fence. I understood her perfectly, because how much can you tell, repeat your traumatic story? 10? 20? What number is even subject to logical verification here?
Did Bucza change your mind about the Russian invasion? .
(Laughter) No, not at all. I spent two years in Chechnya, both during the first and second wars, and I know very well the nature of the Russian invasion. And nothing about this war is unique, except for the fact that the Russians used the same violence against their "Slav brothers" as before against the Chechens, whom they consider an inferior nation, standing lower in the hierarchy. This can be seen with the rest in the contemptuous language: "muslims," "blacks," "dark ones."
In contrast, we find in your book characters who learn to question contempt and hierarchy. Dmytro Reznichenko is a converted nationalist who emerges from the cauldron during the defense of Ilovaysk in 2014, bonds with a woman who teaches him leftist views and acceptance of LGBT people. Reznichenko later carries a UPA flag at Gay Pride in 2018.
I also describe an encounter with a lesbian in uniform who carried such flags at Gay Pride. I asked her why, to which she replied that she came to the parade to emphasize the presence of gays and lesbians in Ukraine's armed forces. The history of the UPA didn't matter to her, she didn't necessarily know it at all. The idea was to show the presence of LGBT people in the army, to emphasize their patriotism and solidarity with the public during the invasion. But instead of using the blue and yellow flag, she waved the black and red one, because that somehow seemed even more patriotic to her. .
You write that the Bandera is today an empty emblem, possible to be filled with completely different content.
This is a problem of fragmenting memory, because it is quite different to remember the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Bandera for people from eastern Ukraine whose parents or grandparents were involved in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and OUN during the war, and quite different for the grandchildren of Red Army soldiers.
Bandera was an uber-criminal during the war, a dog on a German leash. I tried to explain this in the book, because due to a confluence of several events, his biography is neither scholarly nor decently described in Ukraine - whether before or after 1991. A decent, scholarly biography of Bandera, Mykhailo Medved or Roman Shuchevych has not been published. They can be found in the West, in Germany and the US, but not in Ukraine, where either simplification to the verge of vulgarization or heroic books written by extremists dominate.
People have no real idea who this man was and what he really did. On top of that, when the Russians started calling Ukrainians Bandera after 2014, most people took this attempted insult as a compliment. So they began to carry the black flag without any idea of what it represented. They started idealizing Bandera or at least using him to build associations. Bandera became the hero of jokes and later memes.
They would not catch on in Poland, even though scholarly biographies of Bandera are not very popular in our country either.
Of course, because Bandera means a very specific thing to Poles - he is a symbol of the slaughter in Volhynia and Galicia. However, it is important to remember that the existing nationalist extremism in Ukraine is a small movement, which lost its importance after the fall of Yanukovych and the outbreak of war. This movement is much smaller than in Poland or France, where it is associated with a party that now holds 150 seats in parliament, supported the Vichy government, and its members tortured people during the Algerian war. They have a very dark history and are very close to power in France.
Why and in what sense are places like Babi Yar and Bucha uncomfortable today? How can we incorporate them into our memory and idea of history?.
I think the goal is precisely not to include them - at least not in a convenient or obvious way. There is a term for this in English: Inconvenient Place, which also became the title of my book. I think it's a good thing when certain places remain uncomfortable, when people and facts make them impossible to be easily tamed or integrated into everyday life. Does this mean that these places still have their power of influence? I think so. In Babi Yar, 99.9 percent of the people who pass there - running in the park, walking, walking their dogs, dating and pushing strollers with babies - remain indifferent to them, for them it is simply part of the city.
In 2021, on the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, Antoine and I prepared an exhibition in the subway - this was early in our work, even before I wrote the book. The subway station space featured signage and information boards, as well as photos. The neighborhood residents' reactions to our project were unequivocally negative. My friends from Kyiv relayed to me that we were criticized for showing their "beautiful place" in a hurtful, stress-inducing and depressing way. Similar voices have been raised in regard to Bucha. It is a beautiful, charming town that will forever again be associated with tragedy. Most residents, however, want Bucza to regain its former tranquility and simply be Bucza again. And I understand this perfectly. If a place is your home, you don't want it to remain a symbol of cruelty forever. This is precisely the paradox of memory.
**
Jonathan Littell - novelist, reporter, columnist. His best-known novel, Graceful, was published in French in 2006 and was honored with the Goncourt Prize and the French Academy Literary Award. He is the author of non-fiction books about Chechnya, Syria and Francis Bacon's novel The Old Story. The New Version and several novellas. He writes for Le Monde, The Guardian and the London Review of Books.
