"Folks, run home," a senior lieutenant with a bandaged head told the diggers. "Your trenches went under the cat's tail. Our next defense line lies behind Dnieper River."

     "We're unfit, but law-abiding citizens still," Jankel said. "We've got an order to dig the trenches here and were warned the deserters would be dealt with according to martial law."

     "Cruelty of the law is redressed by its non-mandatory execution. Your law enforcers keep the tail up like a pistol (i.e., are brave) behind the river already. At 8:00 p.m., the soldiers I left behind will stop firing a barrage and run away one by one."

     The officer did not know that some NKVD (known later as the KGB - the security police) subversives remained in the city with a secret mission.

     When Jankel got home, his family had already run out of money and sold or exchanged whatever they could for food. Some neighbors got to Darnitza, lost their belongings there, ran out of food and came back to Podol with terrible stories.

     When Jankel's family wanted to flee, they waited for him to come back from Great Satan only is aware where. Of about 170,000 Jews of Kiev, 70,000 remained.

     Pieces of furniture, crafts and china in his neighbors' apartments astonished Jankel.

     "The Jews fled. So we took what we need," they rationalized. He said nothing, because they acted very natural and would not grasp his disgust.  

     On the next day, the Wehrmacht units entered Kiev and occupied best downtown buildings on Kreshchatik Street - the cream de la crème of the Soviet elite.

     The looting started, and Jankel did not venture out of the courtyard. Then, on September 24, five days after the Germans occupied the city, like a whirlwind, the courtyard janitor broke the stupendous news: 

     "Did you hear, Jankel? Somebody blew up the German headquarters at about 4:00 p.m. The shocked Fritzes cordoned off the area and detained all people, suspected or not."

     "Delightful Kiev ain't revolting Paris!" Jankel smirked, but did not hide his agitation.

     A day after, the woman was shocked herself: "Mines blow all German buildings on Kreshchatik one after another and kill many, along with our own."

     "Did they miss Korolenko Street?" Jankel asked. Even children would assume he meant the dreadful Soviet State security's site.  

     "Yes, they actually did. The subversives spared the Gestapo headquarters there."

     "Regimes come and go, but the state security remains. In the same building!"

     If Jankel survived in 1943, he could reiterate that phrase again. When the SS fled, they returned the favor, and the NKVD moved right back in the same premises.

     On September 26, 1941, the infuriated and scared German administration, SS and army commanders looked for scapegoats no further. Again, it was God's choice. Propaganda Company No.637 authored and the Sixth Army printed the notices.

     "Jankel, did you see the posted order?" Like a tornado, the janitor broke the incredible piece on September 28. "All Jews are to come with their papers, valuables, and schmatas on September 29 at 8:00 a.m. at the Melnik and Dekhtyarev streets corner. Any Jew found elsewhere will be shot!"

     "That's near Babi Yar. What for?"

     "For the resettlement in new locations, the notice said."

     "Why us?" Jankel did not act - was natural.

     "In retaliation for sabotage activities and setting fire to the city heart."

     "The fit men are in the Red Army, and those smarter, healthier, and richer have gone too," Jankel reasoned.

     "To punish whom?" sober Granny asked. "Women, children, the disabled, old, ill and frail? They are least able to commit the offence."

     "Germans will deport us either to our blessed Palestine, or to a Soviet territory from the nearby railway goods-yard," Jankel speculated.

     "The chosen?" the Granny disputed.

     "We're related to Germans as people. Their own princess invited us from their own country. She became great. Catherine the Great - a Russian Empress," Jankel explained. "They move us away from the war horrors. One cultured nation helps another with alike language."

     "It isn't deportation. We won't go," Grandma suggested. 

     "The neighbors and courtyard janitors will diligently remove from the apartments and give Jews away to the police," the janitor said. "A man immaculately dressed in a starched shirt and bow-tie told our janitors about that in Russian. He had a strong western Ukrainian accent and astounded us with Yids, not Jews. I had never heard this word from any official."

    "Policemen are Ukrainians," Jankel smirked. "Kiev doesn't have Frenchmen for sure. Yet, if he is from Poland, then this is almost okay. They don't know that Yid is offensive."

     "They are called the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and came along with Germans from Ukraine's Polish part the Red Army recaptured two years ago," the janitor corrected. "The Ukrainian nationalists set up the militia units, and the invaders encouraged them fully."

     "Ukrainians could beat neither Poles, nor Russians, nor Tatar. But one has to beat somebody for the sake of equilibrium. So, they will beat Jews - a small minority."

     Actually, it was Heinrich Himmler who ordered on July 27 to form the mobile Ukrainian Auxiliary Police Constabulary under the jurisdiction of the SS and German police commanders. They equipped the Ukrainians with black uniforms and captured Soviet light weapons, housed them in barracks and deployed in major police operations. They imposed often a collective fine upon the Jews to defray the policing costs.

In the first few days of the Western Ukraine occupation, the Ukrainian police, as an organized group or on an individual basis, participated in the Jewish pogroms. While leading the Jews to places of work and guarding ghettos, they extorted money from, harassed, and frequently shot the Jews merely for the sake of sport.

     "Nothing spoils one's day so much as the preceding hellish, dreadful, and restless night of weeping, swearing, trembling and howling," Jankel said to the janitor. "I entrust you the keys to our apartments with all our possessions.  We're unable to carry much, have no valuables, and take along just food and bare necessities of life."

     The family said good-bye to their neighbors, went to the appointed spot early (to get best seats, presumably). There, Sonderkommando, Waffen-SS, and Ukrainian police directed Kiev to the northwestern area cordoned off by a barbed-wire fence and comprising the Babi Yar ravine and two cemeteries, one of which was Jewish.

     The evacuation order deeply affected the Russian and Ukrainian neighbors. Friends and relatives saw their Jews off, helped them to carry the children and bags. The rest watched, whistled, insulted and snatched the belongings from the Jews on the streets leading to Babi Yar.

     "From time immemorial, you, Yids, profited out of somebody else's blood and were members of secret parasitic organizations," the mob gloated over.  "Many Yids took poison yesterday. Some threw their children and themselves out of tall buildings."

     "It's surprising how quickly nice people quite willingly and simply adapt and propagate a wild theory to kill anybody, even their own," Jankel noted. 

     Farther on the barbed-wire, barriers on the streets acted like a hydraulic back valve - let the herd in, but not out.

     "Something is wrong," Granny said, hearing machine-gun fire. "Will they shoot us?"

     "It's merely unimaginable," Jankel debated. "There is neither apparent reason, nor any historical precedent to shoot such a mass of people." 

     "Mr. God is the best inventor and scriptwriter - invents totally unexpected denouement," she sighed.

     After the barriers, the Sonderkommando 4a, headed by Paul Blobel and reinforced by the Ukrainian policemen, treated the Jews, like sheep in an Australian barbershop. To process better, they stopped the flow intermittently, counted coming in, threw their documents into bonfires, took their possessions into one place and the food into another. 

     "How will we retrieve our luggage back if they ship it in a freight wagon?" a woman asked Jankel.

     "Detainees and prisoners have no possessions." He still did not imagine their fate.

     Farther on, the executioners took the Jews from the front of the line in groups of ten and led them to a corridor, 4-5 feet wide, formed by rows of barking German shepherd dogs and laughing killing squads. They calmly and impartially dispensed soothing Aryan justice and sped up the inferiors' herd with "Schnell! Schnell," sticks and rubber clubs.

     The soldiers laughed happily, set the dogs on fallen Jewish weaklings, delivered the blows to most vulnerable places and a small sermon: "Jews aren't sheep - will tolerate anything."

     It was the power of darkness and the darkness of the power in action. The difference between resistance and submission depends on the right information and possessing the arms. That is why Babi Yar is not a prime example of utter Jewish helplessness in the face of the tragedy. 

     The herd pushed forward, trampled the fallen into the ground, and ended at an entrance to the Jewish cemetery. There, the interests of the faithful coincided. God blessed them. Neither the faithful Jews, nor the faithful Germans, nor the faithful Ukrainians wanted to profane the Christian cemetery nearby.

Naturally, Creator was superb in creating Babi Yar's majestic playground.  Woods, allotment gardens, and cemeteries surrounded that enormous ravine - deep, wide and steeped. A stream in its bottom collected the rainwater from the slopes and found its way to Dnieper River.

     Besides, dear Sir was the greatest communicator - right into the Germans' ears. After only a few busy days of settling down in the city and escaping from fires, they came up with and developed the idea to use Babi Yar for their bloody trick. Since only the locals knew the Yar, Roma assumes the Ukrainians were God's prophets who informed the valorous Aryans. 

     "Take all your clothes off!" the Ukrainian policemen ordered as the screaming and crying Jews exited the corridor of soldiers onto an area overgrown with grass. The Ukrainians' sticks and the Germans' knuckledusters fortified the command for those who hesitated.

     Mothers were fussy over and slow with their children. The enforcers relieved that sensitive predicament. They grabbed away and threw the kids over the cemetery brick fence.

     At the ravine edge, 20-30 m above the precipice, the executioners divided the Jews in two columns and led them in groups of ten to the ravine mouth, then lined up and machine-gunned them. When the killed, wounded and half-dead fell down, next ten came. The shooting squads relieved one another every few hours. Sometimes, to save bullets, they lined up the naked Jews one after another and threw small children by the legs alive into the Yar. 

     A few gentile relatives and friends tried to be helpful and accompanied their Jews after the barriers. The Germans staffed a barricade and checked the identification papers of those wanting out. If the latter missed that, then tough luck! The Germans shot them too - will not spread false rumors outside.

     A certain Dina Pronicheva's turn came in the darkness, and she dived down herself, ahead of the bullets, and landed safely on the dead bodies. 

     After the shooting stopped, the Germans with flashlights went down into the ravine and finished off those who moaned and stirred. Dina lay still, and the squad missed her.

     At the end, sluggish Ukrainian policemen threw earth over the piled-up bodies. They did that improperly. Some wounded Jews managed to crawl out.

     In vain! The locals gave all them away anyway. Dina survived.

     The executors were not tireless robots and needed some rest after the exhausting day. Not all though. Some of them were dying too - to experience the pleasure of the hard work. They led to the ravine and used young Jewish females as sperm receptacles, alone or jointly. After all that shooting noise and racket of the day, the executors got weary of the girls' tears and cries, did not shoot them after all and used the bayonets instead. 

     The next night was anxious, but the troopers had hearts and allowed the patient and obedient Jews to sit on the ground and wait for their turn to meet the ancestors in the better world. Nothing spoils one's night sleep so much as the preceding dreadful day.

     On September 30, the 36-hour bloodbath orgy was over. For 33,771 Jews only, as Einsatzgruppe officially reported and noted smugly that "owing to exceptionally clever organization," the Jews did not realize what awaited them until the last moment and "there were no incidents." Of course, the Babi Yar bloodbath as such was not new but became distinctive as the first industrialized massacre.

     In the following months, the Germans and Ukrainian policemen seized, took to Babi Yar, and shot many more thousands of Jews. A few of the general population helped them to hide. After the war, the German commanding officer testified that the Ukrainians informed on the Jews "by the bushel," and his Kiev office even lacked manpower to deal with them all. 

     The occupiers would be inept to round up the wanted without so-called local Volksdeutches and the "real Ukrainians." They knew the neighbors, the region, and were the sorts of population that cringed before and supported any regime.

     Effortlessly, informers sent their rivals or subjects of envy into the grave. 

     The Germans invented no new terminology and adopted the Soviet foedefinition - the enemy of the people. But they were more generous than the Soviets and posted notices: "Any informer on hiding Jews, partisans, unregistered communists and other enemies of the people will receive cash, food or a cow."

     But the Ãœbermenschen turned to be human after all - failed to estimate properly the enormous forces of the free enterprise. They ran out of the goodies, canceled the awards program and allowed the profiteers to confiscate the victims' belongings. However, Germans despised the slanderers wanting only the goodies.

Ukrainian entrepreneurs turned to double-dipping too. They sniffed out the hiding Jews: "Give us all you have voluntarily, or we'll squeal."

     They got the goodies, kept eye, informed on the suckers and insisted on the award from the police too.

     The mob was not the same that robbed and burnt the estates of landowners during the revolution in 1917. It was the industrious mob stopping at nothing to enrich themselves at worst, or saving their own skin at best. Back in the early thirties, they looted well-to-do peasants of everything, put that into collective farms, and sent the victims to Siberia.

     Roma is consoled that the people he knew did not go too far to meet Buzya - their late brother, son and uncle. His body rested in the same place for a while, only on the higher grounds.

     Thus, Roma's relatives brought a violent death upon themselves. A maternal aunt and her two toddlers were unable to flee from Kiev. Her husband was killed as well, albeit in action. Others, like Jankel, suggested Hitlerites could not be worse than the Soviets. They were not wrong. They were dead wrong in the ravine perfectly suited for the unmarked fraternal grave for all those victims.

     Roma's granny will not break his toy horse next time! Nor will the courtyard shaman dispense her lousy massage advice. 

     The murderers were not moronic psychopaths. Honorable people in the peaceful time, they acted in accordance with the scientific eugenic tradition of the racial purity and superiority over sub-humans. The murderers were intelligent and sensitive people. After a day of such exhausting service to the humanity in the front line of a death factory, they went home to their own bed-warmers and children. At Chicago slaughterhouses, some vicious uncles toiled in the front line of bacon and beef too.

     The Holocaust began as a "practical" solution labeled "The Final Solution." The Third Reich answered money and labor problems by killing Jews and other "undesirables" and confiscating their assets. They were not the "enemies of the State," they were her nourishment and were devoured as such.

     Babi Yar's bloodbath was not the perfect solution though. Why squander the victims' hair, their teeth's gold fillings, children's dolls, suitcases, and the rest? Their holders reached their final destination for sure.  Practice makes perfect. Later German death camps proved that. The hairstuffed pillows and mattresses. The melted gold fillings filled foreign banks' vaults, and so on. Germans were happy using the victims' belongings just as the former owners were. Excellent German craftsmanship made fine lampshades, wallets and other goods from the victims' skin and thus solved the wartime shortage of leather.

     Dogs-and-children-loving Führer, teary-eyed listening to Wagner, sincerely believed that other people were commodities, objects and things to serve Germans' own selfish needs, and what he did was all for the good of the German people.

     However, Roma gives credit where credit is due. The Moscow rulers started first, albeit they did not go that far.

     "Armenians of the world! Save Jews!" a fictitious Armenian radio called decades after the war. "After finishing off Jews, your friendly neighbors will kill you."

     In Babi Yar, Armenian corpses were in a minority though. But every joke holds a grain of truth. A half-century later, Baku's Armenians pretended they were Jews because Azerbaijanis murdered Armenians. 

Germans undeserved the accusation that they were preoccupied with Jews. After eradicating the Jewish danger, they murdered other minorities too, just for being such.

     After running out of the Kiev Jews, the Aryan toilers of the racial purity switched their attention to the Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital. A certain Galya - a young Ukrainian peasant woman - stayed with Roma's family when she traded farm produce in a Kiev market. She helped Frieda to care for Roma before the war too. His conscience was treacherously asleep then but got the perfect Ukrainian pronunciation from her anyway. 

     After the war, Roma had a bloody encounter with a neighborhood boy once. Galya recognized his Ukrainian father.

     "That lame anti-Semite made passes at me in 1941," she said. "When the war started, that draft-dodger mutilated his toes and worked as a nurse aid at the psychiatric ward."

     Germans neither shot nor forced the patients to walk to their death, he said. Methodically, with long breaks for lunch and entertainment, they transported the patients in sealed windowless vans called Gasenwagens (soul-murderers in Russian, mobile gas chambers in English). The exhaust gases went inside the German ingenuity product. Then Germans dropped the dead bodies from a removable grating on the van floor into Babi Yar's pits. (In his twenties, Roma worked with exhaust gases too. But the products of his ingenuity were lifts and heaters for dump trucks.)

     The German toilers of Kiev's psychiatric wards were egalitarians and felt indifferent about the Slavic patients. Long before, the German medical establishment practiced euthanasia on its own Aryans - those who were born deformed, had mood disorders, or debilitating old age. Kaiser Wilhelm proposed first to gas Jews.

     In 1910, the Royal Commission concluded that feeble-minded and insane classes constituted a national and race danger in England. A certain cigar addict and home secretary agreed, but failed to introduce forcible sterilization. He became a Prime Minister nonetheless and headed the Western democratic forces against Nazis until the Yanks took over. 

     As to Babi Yar, after dispatching the loony patients just for being such, the Germans haunted down and exterminated Gypsies for the same reason, a camp at a time. Of course, for one or another reason, Gypsies and Jews were outsiders in Europe. Besides, Gypsies were out of place at the advent of the industrial society. In 1725, Frederick William I, a Prussian king, decreed to kill all of them older than eighteen. Yet, Gypsy music and poetry inspired the rest Europeans, including most famous musicians. 

     The upbeat ending of the poor things still happens in one or another variety in one or another part of the world. The most important history lesson is that none exists without a copycat. Being not a head shrink, Roma does not care of the psychoanalysis, with its possible unreality and arbitrariness. The trivial fate of trivial mortals is not more trivial than the trivial pursuits of less trivial people, like the trivial Danish neurasthenic, whatever W.  Shakespeare's opinion on that matter. If he lived in our time, you bet, he would write a non-trivial tragedy shaking our trivial universe off its hooves. 

     But odd things do happen. Times change, but people remain the same.  Yet, German shepherd dogs are not people - they learn! During a halfcentury after the war, the animals changed their personality. Breeders have probably filtered out the natural aggression. The German police drummed poor shepherds out of the canine corps as having grown too soft for today's people. The replacement is the beauceron - a French dog. That large, athletic, fierce, and ugly canine combines the qualities of a rottweiler and a Doberman pincher - both of the German breeds.

     Amen.