The Babi Yar massacre is the mass killing of Kyiv’s Jewish population that Gilah Berkowitz recalls witnessing as a child. In the novel, the ravine holds two histories at once: a mass grave hidden beneath a green park, and the place where Gilah saw her brothers led to their deaths after she had turned her family in. Her return in memory makes the atrocity inseparable from the guilt and survival choices that shape the rest of her life.

The Order and the Site

The account situates the killings in autumn 1941, beginning with a public order dated 29 September. It instructed all Jews living in Kyiv and its suburbs to assemble at eight o’clock in the morning at the corner of Melnikova and Dokterieva Streets, near the cemetery. They were told to bring documents, money, valuables, and warm clothing; those who disobeyed and were found elsewhere were threatened with being shot. The notice thus presented a coerced gathering as an administrative requirement while making the consequence of refusal explicit.

Babi Yar was a ravine at the city’s former boundary, described as an inhospitable place. The narrative also recalls that guards brought their wives and lovers there, turning the landscape into a setting for their own excursions while people were being killed. Before the massacre, the women’s ravine had symbolized love; in Gilah’s memory, that association is overwhelmed by what happened there. Its meaning does not settle into a single, recovered past: the same site carries the contrast between the life it once represented and the killing that transformed it.

The Massacre

The killing is described as a systematic operation carried out by one German Sonderkommando and two Ukrainian police battalions. Gilah remembers hundreds of people being led to the ravine. Men, women, and children were among them, and the account emphasizes that age and sex offered no protection. In less than forty-eight hours, more than thirty-three thousand people from Kyiv’s Jewish population were murdered. The scale and speed of the operation make the ravine not merely the setting for individual deaths but the endpoint of an organized process of extermination.

The bodies were covered with earth, leaving a mass grave beneath the surface. In the novel’s present, the ravine has become an attractive, green park. That transformation is a pointed contrast, not a suggestion that the violence has been undone: the visible landscape can conceal what lies beneath it, and the apparent calm of the site coexists with the historical truth it covers. Gilah’s memory restores the buried event to the place, making the park’s beauty and the grave part of the same account rather than opposing versions of it.

Gilah and Her Family

Gilah remembers hiding in tall grass near a clump of trees, about twenty metres from the ravine’s edge, because she wanted one last glimpse of her father and her two older brothers. She did not see her father there, but she saw her brothers among a group of young boys tied together with barbed wire. The boys were made to move while their group included those who were dead or unconscious. Both of Gilah’s brothers were still alive when they reached the edge of the ravine; they were made to kneel and were shot. The account gives the brothers’ deaths a place within the mass killing without making them representative of all the people murdered there: they remain Gilah’s family, seen by her at the moment she could not save them.

The remembered scene is tied directly to Gilah’s admission that she had turned in her own family. She kneels at the site in the present of the narrative, in the same posture as her brothers, and experiences the past and present together. She traces everything she has done in her life back to those autumn days. The massacre is therefore not only an event she witnessed; it is the turning point through which she understands her own actions and the identity she later adopts.

The novel places her betrayal within a wider history of informing. Under Stalin’s dictatorship, Gilah recalls, friends could be made into enemies and even committed Stalinists were unsafe. After the Germans arrived, the demands to inform continued with their targets reversed: Jews and Communists were now denounced. Gilah describes herself as having acted as others did in an effort to adapt and survive. That context does not erase her responsibility for betraying her family; instead, it shows the coercive political conditions in which she made the choice and the lasting consequences she carries.

Memory and Consequence

Gilah’s recollection links the public scale of the massacre to a private history of loss, complicity, and survival. The narrative moves between the official notice, the mass killing, the deaths of her brothers, and the older woman’s return to the same place in memory. This structure makes the past active in the present: she is not simply recounting what happened but confronting the event as the origin of choices that followed.

Her survival depends, in her account, on becoming someone other than the Jewish girl she had been. She regards survival as possible by adapting into the identity of a strong young man, a transformation that makes the massacre’s consequences extend beyond the deaths at Babi Yar. The event marks the point where family, identity, and the possibility of an ordinary future are shattered. The ravine’s buried history and Gilah’s effort to live as someone else become parallel forms of concealment, neither of which can make the past disappear.