Babi Yar in poetry

")[4] For decades after World War II, Soviet authorities were unwilling to acknowledge that the mass murder of Jews at Babi Yar was part of the Holocaust.

"[6] By November 1941, the number of Jews shot dead at Babi Yar exceeded 75,000, according to an official report written by SS commander Paul Blobel.

[9] The deaths of these non-Jewish victims facilitated the Soviet Union's postwar efforts to suppress recognition of Babi Yar's place in the history of the Holocaust, especially in the aftermath of the 1952 executions of prominent Jewish intellectuals dubbed the "Night of the Murdered Poets.

Poems by Holovanivskyi, Ozerov, Ilya Ehrenburg and Pavel Antokolsky (Death Camp) soon followed, but the Jewish identity of the victims was revealed only through "coded" references.

[6] Possibly the first known poem on the subject was written in Russian the same year the massacres took place, by Liudmila Titova, a young Jewish-Ukrainian poet from Kiev and an eyewitness to the events.

The anniversary of the massacre had been observed in the context of the "Great Patriotic War" throughout the 1950s and 60s; the code of silence about what it meant for the Jews was broken only in 1961, with the publication of Yevtushenko's Babi Yar, in Literaturnaya Gazeta.

[17] After its publication in Literaturnaya Gazeta, Dmitri Shostakovich set it to music, as the first movement of his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar.

Any further publications about the subject were prohibited, along with the Black Book project of 1947 by Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman,[25] as part of the official Soviet rootless cosmopolitan campaign.

[26] In 2017,[27] Marianna Kiyanovska published a poetry book titled The Voices of Babyn Yar, for which she was awarded the Shevchenko National Prize in 2020.