Babi Yar

Netanyahu compared the festival killings to the Babi Yar massacre, one of the most infamous mass slaughters of World War II in which more than 33,000 Jews were killed.

They were crimes that beggar the imagination — 33,771 men, women and children shot or buried alive in the ravine near Kyiv called Babi Yar; the two-day liquidation of 25,000 Latvian Jews from Riga’s ghetto, forced to lie down in pits and shot; the spectacle of a barbarian in Lithuania who killed Jews with a crowbar while crowds cheered and an accordion played marches and anthems.

Told in unorthodox fashion, through letters exchanged between Freud and his colleagues, long sexual fantasies written by Lisa in verse and prose, and a case study written by the fictional Freud, the novel leaps forward in time, following Lisa’s post-treatment career and her horrific death at Babi Yar.

By chance, he began reading Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel “Babi Yar,” about the slaughter of 100,000 mostly Jewish Ukrainians near Kiev in 1941, and the light bulb went on.

At the “Babi Yar” concert, though, the audience’s focus seemed to be more on the performance itself, given the ecstatic response to the orchestra and Currentzis — not to mention members of the MusicAeterna Choir and the Bachchor Salzburg.