That last detail hinted at resettlement rather than death and the Nazis, who had only expected around 6,000 to turn up were amazed when more than 30,000 obeyed the edict.īabi Yar was also used for executions of Soviet PoWs, partisans, Ukrainian nationalists, and Roma, and, in total, over 100,000 were killed there, their bodies later exhumed and cremated by slave labourers in an effort to conceal evidence. Following a series of bombings by Soviet Secret Police, the Nazi military governor orders “all Yids” to report to Babi Yar and to bring with them all valuables and warm clothing. We see a calm Kiev on the eve of invasion, but once Kiev is invaded, citizens eagerly claim their posters of “Hitler the Liberator” and children are thrilled to receive little Nazi flags. Later in the documentary we see the Soviets return in July 1944 and a Soviet general and “liberator” being similarly garlanded with flowers. Hence the newsreel footage of Hans Frank being garlanded by the city’s formerly Polish population in 1941, when he became General Governor for the Occupied Polish Region - to them he was indeed, briefly, a liberator. The Soviet Union annexed and occupied it in 1939, and made Ukrainian the language of instruction. The city of Lvov (known as Lemberg when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and now known as Lviv, Ukraine) belonged to Poland between the wars. There is some context that the documentary does not provide. Most startling is the relative absence of fighting, implying collapse, and the vast number of Soviet prisoners who are herded by relatively few guards. The documentary begins with the Nazi invasion. What must have seemed celebratory to them seems condemnatory to us. Indeed, there is one scene where dozens of German soldiers are photographing the Nazi general, Hans Frank - so many tourists in uniform. But otherwise Loznitsa has assembled striking and poignant footage not only from official German, Ukrainian, and Soviet newsreel archives, but also from German amateur movies. Thankfully, there is no footage of the massacre itself to harrow us and the director chooses instead to insert a long, scrolling title extracted from a 1943 Vasily Grossman essay, “Ukraine without Jews”. Context, is a documentary by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa about before and after the September 1941 massacre by machine gun fire of 31,771 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev. S howing at this year’s London Film Festival were two extraordinary films from Eastern Europe.

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This article is taken from the November 2021 issue of The Critic.

Natural Fashion by Hans W. Silvester