Layers of Memory in Kuznetsov’s and Trubakov’s Babi Yar Narratives

Abstract

Abstract This article examines two memoirs of authors who indirectly witnessed the horrendous crimes committed by Nazi Einsatzgruppen squads in Babi Yar where more than 33,000 of the Jewish inhabitants of Kiev were brutally murdered on 29–30 September 1941: Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel and Ziama Trubakov’s The Riddle of Babi Yar: The True Story Told by a Survivor of the Mass Murders in Kiev, 1941–1943. Starting from Kuznetsov’s final remarks on the power of memory that will never fade even if only few witnesses or survivors remained to tell the story, I will show what types of witnessing occur in both memoirs: the two narrators use both “ear-witnessing” (Susan Vice’s term), eye-witnessing, and “flesh-witnessing” (Yuval Noah Harari’s term) in the structure of their books and, following Amos Goldberg’s model for first-person Holocaust memoirs and diaries, I will show how these three types of witnessing unfold the story of Babi Yar.