A quantum war

It feels like we’re slipping between historical planes. There are many choices to make — and it is desperately important that we figure out how to make the right ones.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As I go through edits on a long-form story I’m writing for The Guardian, there are excised portions I still think are worth reading. Here is one. A post like this is normally under a partial paywall. But I want you to read what you’re hopefully investing in by signing up with a subscription. Thank you, as always, for reading.

A now overgrown section of Babi Yar, a WWII killing ground in Kyiv. (Photo by Andreas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)

By the time I wake up on my last day in Ukraine, two missiles have already hit Kyiv. Fired a little after 6 a.m., they’d hit a kindergarten playground and a residential building, killing one man. I don’t know what’s roused me — the sound of the strikes or the calm lady from my iPhone app who tells me five or six times a day to pay attention, missiles have been launched toward Kyiv Oblast. A second air raid alert, which blares through my phone as well as in the city streets, has already started up.

As the horns sound with a muddy Doppler effect: up, down, up, down; people remain in cafes, working, doing whatever they were doing. It’s a lot to seek cover so many times a day, and the constant adrenaline shifts are wreaking havoc on my endocrine system. But with the hits being so close to my apartment today, I’ve thrown on my “press” body armor and gone into the stairwell — the idea is to get behind two thick walls from outside and away from all glass. As I take notes and record sound, a cleaning woman casually enters my neighbor’s apartment with a stack of sheets and a wave. Now I feel foolish sitting here.

I go outside to do a little reporting. The sun is blazing, and the sky is a blue lake. But two rumblings of what sound like thunder but are likely bombs — perhaps intercepted — send me back inside. I’m grateful to be leaving the country tomorrow morning, but as with every time I leave a war zone or refugee area, I feel guilt, and also know that part of myself will stay with the people I’ve met for months, or even years, as I comb through notes, do further interviews and write.

Nobody here is exempt from dying in the horrors of war.

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Tonight, my fixer and driver have taken me to a Crimean restaurant, complete with an accordionist. When we finish eating, it’s about 8:30. We’re near the apartment building that was hit this morning, so we drive over to go take a look just as the sky is turning orange and shadows are growing longer.

Emergency workers are slapping the soot from their coats and checking their phones. The building itself is cordoned off, so we don’t stay long.

“You want to go to Babi Yar?” my fixer asks.

“No,” I say.

Called “the most terrible two acres on earth” by journalist Bill Downs of Newsweek in a 1943 story, Babi Yar was the killing ground for 33,771 Jews in just two days in 1941. Marched through the city, they were forced to remove their clothes and were shot, falling into the ravine in waves, or dying as they lay down in the pit on top of bodies in a formation the Germans referred to as “sardine packing.” In the following two years, as many as 70,000 more people — Gypsies, Ukrainians and others — were killed and covered with layers of sand from the sides of the ravine. Eventually, around 300 Russian prisoners were forced to unearth the bodies and burn them over the course of 40 days in an attempt to cover up the Nazi horrors.

The death ravine of Babi Yar holds no appeal tonight, not after today’s bombing. But I’ve been wanting to pay homage during my stay, and this is my last chance.

My colleagues insist — we’ll go.

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The sun is nearly gone, with subtle pink lining the horizon, as we step out of the car and into a copse of chestnut trees. Before us is a grassy field. Nowhere in sight are the memorial’s multiple art installations. Just grass and trees. We walk forward.

As if there is an electrified fence, I stop less than 100 yards in. There is nothing to do but stand and consider the bones beneath the soil.

In March, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Russians had bombed Babi Yar, something he called “beyond humanity.” There has been dispute ever since as to whether the site was hit, or if only the nearby TV tower, which looks like something out of a Russian Constructivist painting. I saw at least that damage with my own eyes.

I’ve been puzzling for months over the complexity of the strange confluences of this war, and the possible bombing of a killing ground of nearly 34,000 Jews only adds to the confusion. There has been Russian rhetoric involving Nazis, anti-Semitism and fascism, despite the fact that the Russians have long had an anti-Semitic past themselves (my own family were forced out by pogroms more than a century ago, and Stalin’s rule post-WWII was punishing to Jews). But exactly who, in 2022, is pushing what narrative?

Ukraine is known as one of the most historically anti-Semitic places in the world, but it now has a Jewish president. The Russian rhetoric is a much-believed piece of fiction within that country. President Vladimir Putin has used the ridiculous and widely discredited idea that he is “liberating” Ukraine from present-day Nazis and fighting the country’s “fascists,” which scholars have called “phantom fascists.”

At Babi Yar, there were only 29 known survivors of the massacre. But those survivors’ testimonies and corroborating found documents, as well as on-site visits by journalists and others, resulted in at least some justice for the legions of dead, at the Nuremberg trials. This history gives some hope that there may also be justice for the perpetrators of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Still, for decades after WWII, the Soviets refused to acknowledge the murders of Jews in these Kyiv pits — to do so would have been against Joseph Stalin’s prevailing policy of anti-Semitism: the Jewish dead didn’t count. The implicit layers of betrayal and hate are entombed within the compacted earth of Babi Yar.

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Standing in the pink glow of the killing site, all these thoughts feel irreconcilable. Because they are.

Primo Levi — author, chemist, Auschwitz survivor, and successful suicide — offers an analogy that seems apt in regard to what Russia has wrought upon Ukraine nearly 80 years after WWII ended.

In his 1975 book The Periodic Table, he wrote: “Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don’t know it and feel safe.” 

This time, instead of being ignorant of invaders and therefore feeling safe, for Ukrainians, the rope has already broken.

Now it’s time to figure out who exactly cut the rope, when and where they did so, and, ultimately, why — even as the murderers, this time the Russians, continue to spread propaganda that dehumanizes Ukrainians as “rats” or “degenerates,” much as the Germans once did about Jews.

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It’s times like this I feel that we truly live in a quantum world: that there is a clear entanglement of different places and times intruding upon one another, that the world is a place in which Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead at the same time.

In a linear world, you can hope that as history passes, humanity will learn from its mistakes. In that same linear world, we know that that’s not always going to happen. But in a quantum world, all of these scenarios exist at once. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine, unlike anything else in my lifetime, feels like we’re slipping between historical planes. There are many choices to make right now — and many ahead. It is desperately important that we figure out how to make the right decisions in regards to proving guilt during these critical confluences of time and memory. Of course, in this thinking, we may have time in the future (or even the future-present) to put things right, but that should not preclude how desperately the Ukrainians need justice now.

I’d like to think that journalists and investigators have some control over this chaos, that we can gather substantive evidence and corroborate it until we can reasonably declare it is truth, but as we’ve seen in America in the past number of years, truth is often not even considered “true” in the linear universe.

It all feels rather hopeless, but at the same time not. If we can sort hatred from love, or even simply acceptance, we can work toward the right outcomes. But that leaves what comes next in the hands of us very fallible humans. So, yet again, humanity is tested, as it long has been. And, yet again, we have to prevail. The cost of losing the war, of another possible genocide, is too evil to consider.