Word: yar
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FIFTY YEARS AGO, thousands of Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis in a ravine in the Ukraine at a place called Babi Yar. Until last week, there was no commemoration of their deaths and no marking of their mass grave. After decades of being ignored by the Soviet government, the newly independent Ukraine erected a memorial to those who were murdered at Babi Yar...
UNDER Soviet rule, the only recognition of the deaths at Babi Yar was a memorial erected in 1974 to Soviet resistance fighters that is a mile away from the ravine where the Jews were killed. The Soviet government refused to admit what happened at Babi Yar because it didn't fit into its state-mandated history...
...government still pays a pension of about $11,000 a year to the widow of the country's deputy Nazi leader during the German Occupation, and that she unrepentantly spends part of the money to distribute neo-Nazi propaganda. Or that the monument the Soviets reluctantly built at Babi Yar is actually half a mile away from the ravine where thousands of Jews were slaughtered, and that in the process of building the monument the Soviets bulldozed Kiev's main Jewish cemetery...
...down after he was denounced in Pravda and saw his friends and colleagues persecuted and purged by Stalin during the Great Terror. This Shostakovich was a survivor, who saved his innermost feelings for his work. "Words are not my genre," he once said to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose poem Babi Yar he set in the brutal Symphony No. 13. "I never lie in music...
...hokum, spectacle and soap opera. The historical narrative plays best, as the series provides a lucid account of the key battles and decisions on which the war turned. It also dramatizes, with chilling bluntness, the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz, as well as the slaughter of Jews at Babi Yar. Few lines on network TV are as shocking as the remark of a Nazi officer on hearing the wails from inside a gas chamber: "It sounds like a synagogue...