Babi Yar

The acclaimed classic documentary novel depicting the Nazi occupation of Kyiv and one of the largest mass executions of the Holocaust.
"[A] masterpiece . . . every bit the peer of the canonical works of witness [such as] Anne Frank's diary [and] Wiesel's Night." —George Packer, The Atlantic

At the age of fourteen, Anatoly Kuznetsov began keeping a diary of life in Ukraine under Nazi occupation. Years later, he combined those notebooks with other survivors' memories to create classic work of documentary witness in the form of a novel. When a censored version of 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 other victims, at Kiev's Babi Yar ravine—one of the largest mass killings of the Holocaust.


Presented here in its full, uncensored 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 avoids transport to Germany, wonders at the pomp of the Nazis' opera performances, overhears his mother and grandparents debate the merits of German versus Soviet rule, collects grenades and 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, Kuzestov tells the story of what happened at Babi Yar—from the deceptive roundup of the city's Jews and the execution of the national soccer team to the memories of the sites few survivors and the story of a daring escape. The book's once-expurgated passages also expose the Soviet effort to hide the realities of wartime. Overall, here is a book that tells some of the past century's most uncomfortable—and most essential—truths.