BABI YAR; A Document in the Form of a Novel / New, Complete, Uncensored Version by Anatoli (Kuznetsov), A - 1970

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970. First Corrected, Expanded American Edition. Cloth. Fine/Fine. 8vo, cinnamon cloth, Mylar-protected dust jacket, [478] pages. This is a superior copy internally and externally of this famous historical reconstruction of the Nazi massacre at Babi Yar.<br/> <br/> Kuznetsov began writing this memoir of his wartime life in a notebook when he was 14. Over the years he continued working on it, adding documents, and eyewitness testimonies.<br/> <br/> His novel was first published in 1966 in a censored and much reduced form by the Soviet literary magazine Yunost, which also added politically correct Communist material.<br/> <br/> In 1969 Kuznetsov defected from the USSR to the UK and managed to smuggle film containing the unedited manuscript. His reconstituted book was published in the West in 1970 under the pseudonym, A. Anatoli. In that edition, the edited Soviet version was put in regular type, the content cut by editors in heavier type and newly added material appeared in brackets. <br/> <br/> An especially poignant episode involves the foiled efforts by the Nazis to execute Ukrainian Jewish actress, Dina Pronicheva (1911-1977). She was a Soviet actress at the Kiev Puppet Theatre, and later became a survivor of the September 29-30, 1941 Babi Yar massacre in Kiev.<br/> <br/> Initially she tore up her identity card and claimed that she was not Jewish and was only seeing someone off, but the Germans decided to kill her anyway so that she would not be a witness. She was then ordered to march to the ravine, to be forced to undress and then be shot. Jumping before being shot and falling on other bodies, she played dead in a pile of corpses. She held perfectly still while the Nazis continued to shoot the wounded or gasping victims. Although the SS had covered the mass grave with earth, she eventually managed to climb through the soil and escape. Since it was dark, she had to avoid the flashlights of the Nazis finishing off the remaining victims still alive, wounded and gasping in the grave.<br/> <br/> After the war, though two dozen others managed somehow to survive, Dina became the solitary witness at a Kiev war-crimes trial of fifteen members of the German police responsible for the occupied Kiev region (January 24, 1946).<br/> (Based on Wikipedia entries.).