THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 31it, and I thought, What’s thirty-four
thousand like?”
They fell quiet. In six months, bombs
began to fall on Kyiv again. In Kharkiv,
Mariupol, Kherson, and other cities, peo-
ple struggled to survive without heat or
running water, and with dwindling sup-
plies of food. Millions of refugees, al-
most all of them women and children,
streamed into Europe. Bodies piled up
in bombed-out buildings and in the
streets. The dead numbered in the many
thousands. In the first days of April, when
Russian troops retreated from the sub-
urbs of Kyiv, they left behind mass graves;
streets strewn with bodies of civilians
with their hands tied behind their backs,
executed at close range; and bodies they
had attempted to burn. None of this had
been imaginable, much as the carnage
of Babyn Yar was unimaginable.
The conversation turned to 2014, when
more than a hundred Ukrainian protest-
ers were shot as they rallied at Indepen-
dence Square. Not long after, Russia oc-cupied Crimea and fomented a war in
the Donbas. Dzhuromska’s family lost
their income because of the war and she
had to quit university in Poland after one
semester. Didenko spoke of the fracture
of her mother’s family, which came from
Donetsk, in the east: one uncle joined
the Euromaidan and supported the
Ukrainian Army while another declared
himself Russian. Furman talked about
seeing the dead bodies in Independence
Square. “You ask how it’s possible to ex-
ecute so many people in two days,” she
said. “The thing is, it’s possible for peo-
ple to execute people.” Furman and her
colleagues weren’t comparing their hard-
ships to the Holocaust. They were talking
through the way life as you know it can
end overnight.W
hen I visited Babyn Yar, it was
close to the eightieth anniver-
sary of the massacre, but the memorial
complex that Poroshenko had promised
five years earlier was not ready. Khrzha-novsky led me on a late-night tour. At
an entrance to the park, we walked down
a gravel path to an installation called
the Mirror Field. The first thing I no-
ticed was a howling sound—it seemed
to come from the nearby road, and the
structure, an elevated round mirrored
platform with ten mirrored columns
protruding upward from it, was ampli-
fying the sound. (An electroacoustic
organ is hidden in the installation’s base,
augmenting ambient noise.) Then there
was a crackling and, finally, a woman’s
voice, saying the names of the dead.
“When you look here, you see your-
self shot,” Khrzhanovsky said.
“What do you mean, you see your-
self shot?” I asked. I wasn’t sure whether
I was meant to look down into the mir-
ror at my feet or straight ahead at one
of the columns. Everything was riddled
with holes, as though bullets had ripped
through metal.
“You see yourself with holes,” Khrzha-
novsky said. “Come, stand here.” HeThe Mirror Field installation at the Babyn Yar site aims to achieve an immersive effect.MAGNUM