I can't be silent! I happened to be born twenty-two years after the Babiy Yar tragedy and almost three years past Kurenyovka's awful happenings. But I remember some events connected with Babiy Yar.

The first one concerns my mother's secret notebook where she used to put down wise thoughts, utterances and popular verses. When I was 11 or 12 she gave me to read "Babiy Yar" by Y. Yevtushenko. Then we long talked about the tragedy of 1941, Kurenyovka's tragedy, about absence of a monument. We could easily explain, though with pain and indignation, the current situation with one capacious word "they", i.e. authorities, anti-Semites and so on.

When a Soviet monument appeared several years later, a different one, in a wrong place, we could also explain that with the same word - "They".

Nowadays a trolley-bus stop near Menorah is called "Park of culture and recreation". But it was "they" who called it so. At present they want to use gifted money to build a Jewish community center on the blood and bones of victims. Though, as the saying goes, one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, I fear a project defenders may find themselves like Trojans who accepted a dangerous gift. This time we would blame not "them", but "us".