Description
By (author) Anatoli A.; Translated by Floyd, David
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This gripping story of Kyiv during the Second World War told by a young boy who saw it all.
”Rightly hailed a masterpiece” Daily Mail
”So here is my invitation: enter into my fate, imagine that you are twelve, that the world is at war and that nobody knows what is going to happen next…”
When the German army rolled into Kyiv in 1941 the young Anatoli was just twelve years old. He began writing down what he saw in his journals.
Within ten days of the invasion, the Nazis had begun their campaign of fear and murder in Ukraine. Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) was the place where the executions of Jews and many others took place. It was one of the largest massacres in the history of the Holocaust. Anatoli could hear the machine guns from his house.
Anatoli’s clear, compelling voice, honesty and determination guide us through the horrors of that time. Babi Yar has the compulsion and narration of fiction but everything recounted here is true.
”Extraordinary” Orlando Figes, Guardian
”A vivid first-hand account of life under one of the most savage of occupation regimes… A book which must be read and never forgotten” The Times
This is the complete, uncensored version of Babi Yar – its history written into the text. Parts shown in bold are those cut by the Russian censors, parts in brackets show later additions.
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Read it and weep… Nothing I have read about that barbaric time has been as
affecting as this
gripping, disturbing book – rightly hailed
a masterpiece
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Babi Yar is one of the classic accounts of life under Nazi rule in occupied Europe and a depiction of man”s inhumanity to man…
[a] masterpiece
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A masterpiece . . . Every bit the peer of the canonical works of witness [such as] Anne Frank”s diary . . . Wiesel”s Night . . . Solzhenityn”s Gulag Archipelago
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Absolutely stunning. A raw, devastating account of one of the greatest tragedies of WW2. Babi Yar provides a painfully intimate look at life during the Nazi occupation in Ukraine through the eyes of one resilient young boy. Told in poetic yet unflinching prose, this compelling book should be necessary reading for anyone looking to not only understand Ukrainian history, but humanity
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Moving and shaking in a way that links it with the works of Solzhenitsyn
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Superb… One of the most frightful exposures yet of human iniquity
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Not just
a great book, but a valuable document
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By the end of this
raw, direct, meticulously assembled collection of testimony, there is no choice but to recognize, and to bow before, the assertion of its opening sentence: “This book contains nothing but the truth”
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A rediscovered masterpiece that must be read and never forgotten
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Rightly hailed as
a masterpiece. In its intimacy, imagery and immediacy, it leaves you despairing that such terrible atrocities were actually committed…
Read it and weep
Biographical note:
A. Anatoli (Kuznetsov) was born in Kyiv in 1929. After training in ballet and acting and working as a carpenter and builder, Anatoli succeeded in forging a career as a writer. His books were heavily censored by the Soviet authorities but they were very successful, selling a total of about seven million copies in the Soviet Union, and were translated into more than thirty languages. Most famous was Babi Yar, published in Russian in 1966.
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