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It’s the 67th anniversary of Kristallnacht and I’ve been crying here tonight.  I’m crying now.  Your hormones change when you get older or something.

I wanted to write something funny about Yevgeny Yevtushenko, to drag his old pre-Glasnost poetic ass forward and rekindle some of the fire we felt when reading Babi Yar forty years ago and more.

But my darkest attempt at humor would fail in this attempt.  There is nothing funny about Babi Yar, nor about Yevtushenko’s brave poetry, unmasking Russian anti-semitism and preserving the memory of those who died outside of Kiev, Jews and Gypsies, homosexuals and POWs, victims of the Nazis.

Tonight I saw a documentary about paper clips.  And I cried.  Some kids in Tennessee collected millions and millions of paper clips.  They were trying to collect six million, but by the time they were done they had twenty-nine million - twenty-nine million paper-clips collected to memorialize the victims of the holocaust, collected as the children learned lessons about hatred, intolerance, and indifference - paper clips from all over, with messages attached from students in Germany, in Poland.  And a boxcar, they received the gift of a boxcar like the ones that hauled those millions of children and women and men to the camps where they were murdered by an inhuman machine, a government machine made out of people empowered and encouraged to ignore their own humanity.  Like the contractors we employ in Iraq, like the government employees working for Cheney and Rumsfeld, offshore, the murderers in Germany, the murderers in Poland, the murderers in Russia (the murderers in Iraq and Serbia and in the CIA gulag) refined their indifference to be able to ignore the stench from the incinerators, the smell of death from bodies decomposing at the bottom of the ravine, and how is Adolph Eichmann any different from Ted Bundy or Rumsfeld?  Cheney? 

Eichmann and Bundy stood trial.  Should we deny Cheney and Rumsfeld this opportunity?  I think not.  And if there is in the world a country with the stones to drag their sorry asses to justice, then I hope it is done, but it will not be done in America because the callous indifference of the German people on the morning following Kristallnacht, the willingness to let friends and neighbors suffer rather than stand strong against injustice, against inhumanity - that willingness to turn away, to resent the victims for upsetting the balance of cool detachment  that permits people to go about their business while brownshirts burn books and the Patriot Act turns the clock back one thousand years - that sickness that consumed so many good people of Germany and Poland and Russia, that sickness is here in America today.  And for every spark of hope kindled by an eighth grade class project there are a million skinheads set to burn books, bomb synagogues and mosques and turn away from the torture that has become government policy under this cruel and inhuman Republican government.

BABI YAR

By Yevgeni Yevtushenko (1961)
Translated by Benjamin Okopnik, 10/96

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself.
The Philistines betrayed me - and now judge.
I’m in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I’m persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.

I see myself a boy in Belostok
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.

I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of "Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!"
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The "Union of the Russian People!"

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed - very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.

-"They come!"

-"No, fear not - those are sounds
Of spring itself. She’s coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!"

-"They break the door!"

-"No, river ice is breaking…"

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May "Internationale" thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!