Man From Barbarossa

Начало книги

Only coarse earth heaped roughly on the gash:

Such Dread comes over me.

Yevgeni Yevtushenko: Babi Yar

PRELUDE

BABI YAR

They came in an orderly fashion, the Jews of Kiev. They came anxiously though not really afraid – not yet, for the notices posted around the city had simply said they were to be relocated. They came with what they could carry. They came in their hundreds, men, women and children. They came with hope. They came at peace with God. They came unprepared. They came, rightly as it turned out, with fear. They came to the corner of Melnik and Dekhtyarev Streets, just as they had been told.

Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Russia, code-named Operation Barbarossa, had begun only three months, seven days earlier, on June 22nd, 1941, for it was now September 29th of that same year – the year Stalin had disregarded all warnings of a Nazi invasion, believing it to be a trap set by England to promote bad feeling between Russia and Germany.

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