Dina Pronicheva

RETURN

She had a way out: her husband was Russian, her passport said Russian. When the Nazis posted their order on every wall in Kyiv — all Jews must gather at Babi Yar — she didn't have to go. She could stay in her apartment with her two small children and wait for it to be over. She went because her parents were going. She couldn't let them walk there alone.

It was September 29, 1941. Kyiv had fallen to the Germans ten days earlier. The order said to bring warm clothing, documents, valuables — it said resettlement, it said the Jews of Kyiv were being moved. The people who walked to Babi Yar that morning walked in a long column, and they carried suitcases, and some of them believed what the signs said. Dina Pronicheva was a thirty-year-old actress at the Kyiv Puppet Theatre. She walked with her parents and her sister into the crowd. Her children were at home with her mother-in-law. At the gate they were ordered to hand over documents and valuables. A German soldier walked up to an old woman near Dina and tore a gold ring from her finger. Her mother turned to her quietly. "Dinochka," she said. "You are Pronicheva. You are Russian."

Dina moved to the side. She told a guard she wasn't Jewish — that she had only come to see someone off. The guard looked at her. He called over another guard. They spoke in German. Then one of them said: she would have to come anyway. She had seen too much. She was a witness. She was pushed back into the column and marched with the others toward the ravine. What happened next she described over and over, in depositions and testimonies given across three decades, in language that never became routine. The people were forced to undress at the top of the ravine. Their documents were destroyed. In groups of thirty or forty they were pushed to a narrow ledge above the steep drop — and shot. Dina jumped before they shot her. She fell onto the bodies below. She landed and went completely still — arms at her sides, eyes closed, not breathing visibly. Guards walked among the bodies shooting the wounded. She felt people dying around her. She felt the earth being thrown over her. She stayed still. When it was fully dark she moved.

An eleven-year-old boy named Fema was alive near her — she didn't know him, he was just a child who had also survived the fall. They crawled together toward the edge of the ravine. A guard saw movement and fired. Fema was hit. Dina kept moving. She reached a house nearby and knocked on the door. They turned her away. She found a barn and hid in the straw. The owner found her and reported her to the Germans. She was taken back to Babi Yar. She escaped again. She lived under a false name for the rest of the occupation — Nadia Savchenko, a worker at a rail plant, then a translator, then whatever the next false identity required. The Gestapo found her son Volodymyr, two years old, and used him as bait — soldiers shot at the child in the street, shouting that she should come out or they would kill him. A neighbor held Dina back from the window with both hands. That neighbor then went downstairs and bribed a guard with her own wedding ring.

The child survived. Dina survived. She found her daughter in an orphanage in March 1944. She lived in the same apartment she had always lived in. She went back to work at the Puppet Theatre.

Dina Pronicheva died in Kyiv in 1977. She was sixty-six years old. 33,771 people were killed at Babi Yar in two days. She was one of fewer than thirty known survivors. She had gone because her parents were going. She had walked back into the line because she couldn't let them go alone.