The well-worn question about whether common people are shaped by extraordinary times, or vice versa rattles always in my mind. Either one believes mankind is putty in time's hands - that common man has the potential for extreme heroically good or dreadfully evil deeds; or one believes that those who do such deeds were never common to begin with and that time is putty in their hands.
The men we read about would be come know as “pillars of history” and they did walk the war and made crucial decisions that would bring about peace and victory; Zhukov, Ike, Monty, Patton, MacArthur... ...but who won the war, who every historian will acknowledge, was the common man. Common men have always won the wars, one might say - and that is true. However, finally the kings and generals were delegated second place on the post war pedestal of glory. The common humans were the ones who became the heroes - famous statues were erected to them and films made that glorified them. Think of the statue of the soldiers lifting the flag at Iwo Jima or the armies of beautiful Soviet realist statues dotting the skyline of Eurasia, all lacking nameplates of their depicted humans, in their sole aim to revere all those who fought.
One of my favorite statues is a relatively new one placed in Babi Yar of Tetyana Markus, who was proclaimed a Hero of Ukraine five years ago. A small woman, her hands are clenched in bronze defiance. As a twenty year old, she threw a grenade into a column of Nazi soldiers. Afterwards, she disappered into the occupied landscape. At twenty one, she posed as a serving girl and poisoned thirty Nazi officers in a canteen. She was arrested by the Gestapo and was executed at age twenty-two. I walked beneath the oak and pines of Babi Yar, and thought of how common people won such a world war, and how if people are putty in time's hands, Tetyana Markus and so many other heroes of WWII were absolutely, inconceivably extraordinary.
Quentin Tarantino made one of my favorite movies of all time in 1994. But his recent film Inglorious Bastards really bothered me. There are so many stories yet to be told about the people who actually lived, suffered and died. The Second World War doesn't warrant fictionalizing of any kind.
Ordinary men were also the ones who became the villains of the war - and it was ordinary men that wound up on trial in Nurnberg for crimes against humanity. They were the camp guards, the middling privates and the mediocre sergeants. The ones who had always thought of themselves as pillars, like Hitler and Goering, shot themselves like the cowards they were, leaving those who dwelled beneath the soles of their underlings to face the noose.
Hollywood has us believe that monsters are aliens in a spaceship, evil masterminds in mansions or drooling psychopaths along a highway. These depictions scare us, but give us comfort in allowing us to believe that we can come to know what a monster looks like. But just like heroes, real monsters look like us and walk among us. What differentiates us from them remains a hefty matter of argument.
Ordinary men did the evil things at Babi Yar, a filled-in gorge in Kyiv. It used to be located on what was considered the outskirts of the city, near a stream where the women would wash their lines. Now, it is surrounded by residential apartments, a park and a metro. It is still a quiet place, aside from the hum of passing cars along the highway nearby.
It's estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered in this place by the Nazis in 1941. Women, children, men and the elderly. Mostly Jewish, but also Catholic, Roma, Orthodox and Muslim. Communists, nationalists or unaligned.
Common or extraordinary, it was unspeakable massacre of humanity that took place. People were the victims, and people were the perpetrators.
Sixty-six years after the end of the war, the flotsam and jetsam of that dark tide are cast ashore all over the planet. We must pick up the pieces, look closely underneath no matter how uncomfortable and learn about what evil in man had once upon a time wrought.
Rusty and fading, or etched in eaten marble as it is, the remains of war nonetheless whisper a warning of human wickedness, "Never forget."
As I left the park, those were the only two words left I could bring myself to think of.
