If one looks at a map of Ukraine, the distance between Babi Yar and Bucha looks to be about 15 miles. The more revealing psycho-historical journey between the two places that is required of us at this moment runs through Moscow via a circuitous route, with mandatory detours marked along the way: One leads to the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, another to the Katyn forest in western Russia. All these roadways are strewn with corpses. It is an itinerary of death, with silent guideposts pointing toward wartime atrocities that challenge our ability to understand how presumably ordinary people can so casually dehumanize and slaughter others.
- In September 1941, a Nazi mobile killing unit, the infamous Einsatzgruppen C, began the systematic murder of Jews in what was then German-occupied Kyiv, efficiently machine-gunning more than 33,000 people in two days in a nearby ravine called Babi Yar. At the time, it was thought to be the largest mass murder of World War II; the existence of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps for the purpose of mass extermination would not be exposed to the world for several more years. On March 1 of this year, Russian missiles struck the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, reportedly killing five people.
- In June 1944, Oradour-sur-Glane, a small village in German-occupied France a few hours west of Lyon, was obliterated by a regiment of Nazi SS Panzer troops, who set about the task of razing every building to the ground, leaving behind the bodies of 642 civilian victims. Among the dead, 190 men were shot, including three parish priests; others (247 women and 205 children) died after being locked inside a church that was then doused with gasoline and set on fire by the SS troops. The ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane still exist today, preserved exactly as the Nazis left the village, offering a chilling reminder of the human capacity for deliberate cruelty as an organized technique of warfare.
- Evidence of a different sort of killing ground was uncovered in 1943 in western Russia, in the Katyn forest near the city of Smolensk, where Soviet NKVD secret police units, precursors to the KGB, summarily executed 4,443 captured Polish military officers on the orders of Joseph Stalin, who wanted to liquidate any potential opposition to his plans for controlling postwar Poland. While Stalin later attempted to shift blame for the corpses exhumed at Katyn to the Germans, forensic data left no doubt that their deaths were by Russian hands.
