Yevgeny Yevtushenko

 

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (B. 1933), a Russian poet

Wrote on the stone wall of the Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.

For I have read and remember, that Tuesday, March Third,

One year away from then to the Millennium, those who were gassed,

Tortured and buried alive - objects of scientific experiment and more,

With their eyes labeled Jew, gypsies, homosexual or Africans of the darker race --

Their incessant scream huddled into the gas chamber of Auschwitz.  I didn't

Know what to do with all those names etched into those glass panels and the shattered families whose photographs were framed happily to the ceiling wall. 

 

I came to Babi Yar because I was there, once in 1991, to understand Yevgeny's poem.

 

The wild grasses over Babi Yar

The trees look ominous,

            Like judges.

Here all things scream

            Silently,

            And, baring my

Head,

Slowly I feel myself

            Turning gray.

And I myself

            Am one

Massive, soundless scream

Above the thousand

            Thousand buried

Here.

 

And I wrote my own for Ukraine, when Babi came flying at my face soliciting my attention.

 

I wanted to turn and look the other way,

But those Russian women kept pointing their fingers,

Raising questions with their blue eyes dripping tears.

 

Is this possible?  I asked they asked.

The statue of a woman clutching her child to her breasts, dying.

Faces holding breath, fists screaming pain,

Hands grabbing their loved ones,

Wanting to hold on to somebody as dirt poured over them,

Rocks crushing their skulls and bullets from the Nazi's guns spraying them.

 

And in that fifty square meter ditch,

There were children buried alive whose courage I cannot fathom.

 

Copyright © by Chath pierSath, 1999

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