Dulce Et Decorum Est

Babi Yar is a ravine outside of Kiev, in the Ukraine. Sixty-five years ago yesterday, the German occupying forces in Kiev posted signs throughout the city reading:

All Jews living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity are to report by 8 o’clock on the morning of Monday, September 29, 1941, to the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets (near the cemetery). They are to take with them documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc. Any Jew not carrying out this instruction and who is found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilian entering flats evacuated by Jews and stealing property will be shot.

At the time, there were about 175,000 Jews living in Kiev and its suburbs. Sixty-five years ago today, on September 29, 1941, thousands of Jewish men, women, and children reported as ordered, expecting to be taken onto trains and deported. At the meeting-place they were surrounded by German soldiers and local collaborators from the Ukrainian auxiliary police, who drove them into small groups of ten, forced them to the edge of the gorge, and then opened fire with machine guns. The mobile killing unit Einsatzgruppe C, which kept records of the massacre, reported that they systematically killed 33,771 Jews from Kiev in two days, on September 29th and September 30th.

After the end of World War II, Stalin’s regime became increasingly anti-Semitic, and the Soviet government refused repeated demands to build a memorial to the dead. This is a poem that the Ukrainian poet Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko wrote twenty years after the massacre, in 1961. The poem became widely known through recitations and samizdat circulation, but could not be published through the State-controlled press until 1984.

BABI YAR

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander over the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself.
The Philistines betrayed me – and now judge.
I’m in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I’m persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.

I see myself a boy in Belostok
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.

I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The Union of the Russian People!

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed — very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.

–They come!

–No, fear not — those are sounds
Of spring itself. She’s coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!

–They break the door!

–No, river ice is breaking…

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May Internationale thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!

Y.A. Yevtushenko (1961), translated by Benjamin Okopnik (1996)

A memorial to the dead was finally placed at Babi Yar in 1991, fifty years after the massacre.

To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize and yet when it comes to the greatest crime–waging war on another state–they praise it!

It is clear they do not know it is wrong, for they record such deeds to be handed down to posterity; if they knew they were wrong, why should they wish to record them and have them handed down to posterity?

If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it is white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish black and white. Or if he were to taste a few bitter things and call them bitter, but on tasting a lot were to pronounce them sweet, clearly he would be incapable of distinguishing between sweetness and bitterness. So those who recognize a small crime as such, but do not recognize the wickedness of the greatest crime of all–the waging of war on another state–but actually praise it–cannot distinguish right and wrong. So as to right or wrong, the rulers of the world are in confusion.

–Mozi (c. 470 BCE–c. 390 BCE)

The quotation appears, with some words apparently lost in printing, as the epigraph in Mark Kulansky’s Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea. For an alternate translation online, see The Ethical and Political Works of Motse, Book V, Chapter XVII.

This is a telegram that Richard B. Russell, then a powerful U.S. Senator for the state of Georgia, sent to Harry S. Truman the evening after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Winder, GA Aug 7 42 7P

The President
(Personal Delivery) The White House

Permit me to respectfully suggest that we cease our efforts to cajole Japan into surrendering in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration. Let us carry the war to them until they beg us to accept the unconditional surrender. The foul attack on Pearl Harbor brought us into war and I am unable to see any valid reason why we should be so much more considerate and lenient in dealing with Japan than with Germany. I earnestly insist Japan should be dealt with as harshly as Germany and that she should not be the beneficiary of soft peace. The vast majority of the American people, including many sound thinkers who have intimate knowledge of the Orient [sic], do not agree with Mr. Grew in his attitude that there is any thing sacrosanct about Hirohito. He should go. We have no obligation to Shintoism. The contemptuous answer of the Japs [sic] to the Potsdam Ultimatum justifies a revision of that document and sterner peace terms.

If we do not have available a sufficient number of atomic bombs with which to finish the job immediately, let us carry on with TNT and fire bombs until we can produce them.

I also hope that you will issue orders forbidding the officers in command of our air forces from warning Jap cities that they will be attacked. These Generals do not fly over Japan and this showmanship can only result in the unnecessary loss of many fine boys in our Air Force as well as our helpless prisoners in the hands of the Japanese, including the survivors of the March of Death on Bataan who are certain to be brought into the cities that have been warned.

This was a total war as long as our enemies held all the cards. Why should we change the rules now, after the blood, treasure and enterprise of the American people have given us the upper hand. Our people have not forgotten that the Japanese struck us the first blow in this war without the slightest warning. They believe that we should continue to strike the Japanese until they are brought groveling to their knees. We should cease our appeals to Japan to sue for peace. The next plea for peace should come from an utterly destroyed Tokyo. Welcome back home. With assurances of esteem

Richard B. Russell, US Senator

Two days later, Truman replied with a one page letter:

Dear Dick:

I read your telegram of August seventh with a lot of interest.

I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare but I can’t bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in the same manner.

For myself, I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the pigheadedness of the leaders of a nation and for your information, I am not going to do it unless it is absolutely necessary. It is my opinion that after the Russians enter into war the Japanese will very shortly fold up.

My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children in Japan.

Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman

Truman sent this letter to Dick Russell on August 9th, 1945 — the very same day that Truman’s humane feeling for the women and children in Japan were demonstrated by an American B-29 bomber, acting on his orders, dropping a second atomic bomb, without warning, on the city of Nagasaki, destroying the city and burning alive about one-third of the civilian population.

Today Truman is often counted as one of the greatest Presidents by American presidential historians. Russell served as a senator until he died of ephysema in 1971. The Russell Senate Office Building was named in his honor and a statue of Russell stands in the rotunda.

AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi

A woman offers prayers as she releases a paper lantern in the Motoyasu River with the backdrop of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, western Japan, Sunday.

Canadian Press (2006-08-06): Japan marks 61st anniversary of U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima

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I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:–Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)