Russian heritage. He reminds the people that most
Russians are good at heart. Yevtushenko argues
that people who are kind and good are being
abused by those people, whose hands have been
dirtied by their crimes. According to Yevtushenko,
the actions of those who use anti-Semitism to per-
secute their fellow Russians have debased all Rus-
sians. Russia cannot unite as one people with these
criminals in their midst.
Lines 43–63
Yevtushenko opens this section by recalling the
story of Anne Frank, a young girl who hid with
her family in an attic until someone betrayed the
family’s hiding place. She later died at the Ber-
gen-Belsen concentration camp, in Poland. Yev-
tushenko again casts himself as the Jew,
vulnerable as the starving girl, who died in
April 1945. He imagines that he is Anne, longing
to share love with Peter van Pels, the teenage boy
who shared Anne’s hiding place in the secret
attic annex. Yevtushenko imagines the two lov-
ers wordlessly exchanging glances. Although
they are imprisoned in their hiding place and
cannot experience the world outside, they can
still share an embrace. This tender embrace
helps them forget the sky that they are not per-
mitted to see or the leaves on the tree that they
cannot touch. Then suddenly the lovers’ tender
embrace is interrupted by the loud noises of the
Nazis, who have come to arrest them. But
Anne’s lover seeks to reassure her and tells her
that the noises that she hears are just the sounds
of spring coming, of the ice in the river breaking
up. He tells Anne not to be afraid, that his
embrace and kiss will keep the danger away.
Lines 64–84
Anne’s story is resolved in the following lines,
with her fearful worry that the door is being
broken down, but her lover provides one last
reassurance that the pounding at the door is
only the ice breaking on the river. Yevtushenko
does not mention that the Frank family was
captured in October 1944. It was not spring
but fall, and even a lover’s embrace could not
protect the fifteen-year-old Anne from the Nazi
extermination camps. The mindless hatred of
anti-Semitism resulted in the deaths of all but
one of the eight people who hid in that attic; only
Anne’s father, Otto, survived their time in the
extermination camps.
In the next line, Yevtushenko moves from
Anne and the stories of destruction caused by
anti-Semitism and returns to Babi Yar, where
even the grass cannot rest at the site of so much
slaughter. Even the physical location has become
representative of the massacre that occurred
there. The trees remain as witnesses to the events
of 1941, standing as if they judge those who
committed this atrocity. The trees also judge
those who allowed it to happen and those who
have forgotten to honor this massacre. All of
nature silently cries out in protest, according to
the speaker, who joins in the silent cries of the
hundred thousand who died at Babi Yar. He
removes his hat in acknowledgment of the events
that occurred twenty years earlier and stands at
the precipice of death. Slowly the speaker’s hair
turns gray, and he is each old man who stood in
this same place, facing his executioners. At the
same time, he is every child who faced the execu-
tioners’ guns. The speaker recognizes that stand-
ing at this place has changed him, and he will
remember with every fiber of his being the events
that took place at Babi Yar.Lines 85–92
In this last section of the poem, the speaker
claims that the ‘‘Internationale,’’ the official
song of the Soviet Union, will be shouted loudly
to acclaim the moment when the last anti-Semite
is buried and forgotten. Yevtushenko ends his
poem by stating that while he is not Jewish, those
who are anti-Semitic now rage against him and
hate him as if he is Jewish. The anti-Semites who
hate Jews are not true Russians. In contrast,
Yevtushenko’s speaker’s hatred of anti-Semi-
tism makes him a true Russian.Themes
Anti-Semitism
An important theme of ‘‘Babii Yar’’ is the destruc-
tion caused by anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was
responsible for the killing of nearly all European
Jewry during World War II, and anti-Semitism at
other times in other countries, such as Ukraine
and Poland, also caused many Jewish deaths. In
his poem, Yevtushenko recalls many of the acts of
anti-Semitism that predated the events of Babi
Yar and the Holocaust. He recalls the slavery of
Jews in Egypt, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the
anti-Semitism in France that resulted in Dreyfus
being persecuted and jailed. In his final example,
Yevtushenko turns to the Holocaust and to AnneBabii Yar