In Europe

murder Ukrainians, Russians and Poles.
    The massacre at Babi Yar was kept out of the history books for years. In 1944 Ilya Ehrenburg wrote an impressive poem about the killings, but after that all remained shrouded in silence. From 1947, Stalin's paranoia turned against the Jews and it was forbidden to mention Babi Yar. In the late 1950s – after Stalin had died – Kiev's municipal administration decided to empty the old Jewish graveyard and build a huge sporting and television complex on that spot. In 1961 the writer Viktor Nekrasov penned a stirring appeal ‘not to forget Babi Yar’, the poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko wrote a song of protest and Dmitri Shostakovich gave his Thirteenth Symphony (1962) the title
Babi Yar
. The first two were arrested and convicted. During that same period, almost all the Jewish gravestones and monuments were removed. In September 1968, when the Soviet authorities set up a memorial, the authorities who spoke at its unveiling fulminated, not against the Holocaust, but against the state of Israel. A Jewish listener who protested – he had heard someone say that 100,000 Jews were ‘not enough’ – was sentenced to three years’ hard labour.
    It was not until 1970, with the publication of the novel
Babi Yar
, that the story was told in full. The book described, for the first time, exactly what had happened, how the families had walked through the streets, what was said and shouted during the final moments. It wasn't until ten years after that that people first dared to gather here on 29 September.
    In one corner of the park, amid the bushes and nettles, I find a fewfallen gravestones from the old Jewish cemetery, badly damaged, probably overlooked during the clearance. Only one name is still legible: Samoeïl Richter.
    One name. Eight million. Between 1941–5, a quarter of the population of the Ukraine was murdered: eight million boys, men, girls and women. What is one to do with a number like that?
    Kiev's war memorial is, as noted, a singularly ugly thing, a towering iron maiden dominating the city with her sword and shield. At the base of this juggernaut lies the war museum. What one sees there is not soon forgotten. Of course there are the ribbons, the medals, the elegantly arranged cannons and the artistically lit wreckage of a plane. But then one arrives at the hall of the dead and the living, a hall with drunken dance music and a long table covered in death notices. On that table, too, are the dented canteens, the old cups and mugs in a long row, and across from them the modern glasses, the glasses of the living, and on the enormous wall behind the photographs of the dead, a huge collage of thousands of family pictures that speak of their lives: a young family in front of a tent, a group portrait of a regiment, a young couple laughing before a kettle of soup, below that three soldiers, standing rigid and upright, a middle-class family in a garden, a sailor, two children in their Sunday best. And the dance music plays on, that eternal dance music for all of us, the living and the dead.
    By last light I leave Kiev on the night train to Odessa, with Irina waving from the platform and the ever-melancholy sound of the station announcer's voice. On the outskirts of town, boys and girls are strolling along the rails. A village: one half houses, one half freight containers. The old straw roofs have given way to corrugated iron. Beneath the trees a family is eating at a large table. Beside the tracks are numberless kitchen gardens, little private fields of grain. A woman is dragging a heavy sled loaded with potatoes along the sandy path beside the rails. Then the endless plains.
    When I climb down from the train the next morning, it is Sunday. The bells are ringing, there are rattling sounds coming from the direction of the harbour, the air tingles with the nearness of the sea. My hotel,situated on the loveliest boulevard in the world, is called the Londonskaya, and it is the city's most famous. In July 1941, during the bombardment, Konstantin Paustovsky stayed here for free, as the final guest, while the windows popped from their frames and the two old waiters calmly served the menu of the day: tea with nothing in it, and slimy brown vermicelli. Fifty-eight years later, fame has gone to the owners’ heads. I spend one night there and pay a sum which the average Ukrainian family could live on for three months.
    The view, however, is still unbeatable. Across from me, to one side, are