49. The first time, we’d gone out the back of the abandoned institute. It was a mistake, we found ourselves tangled up in the undergrowth, floundering in the mud. Finally we reached a path. It led a little further on to a long sad grey wall, flanked at each end by a guard tower with windows covered in blue wire mesh, obviously some kind of prison. It was in fact a psychiatric prison, where, it is said, were held the most dangerous psychotics in Ukraine – rapists, murderers, serial killers. We spent weeks trying to gain access to it, in vain. The story is long and slightly absurd, very Ukrainian in some ways and also completely ridiculous, and not worth retelling here. In any case – after a change of legislation, or from lack of funds, nothing is clear when it comes to this institution – it would be closed once and for all on 21 February 2022, three days before the Russian invasion, and emptied of its charges, who were scattered throughout the country.

50. Just after the prison, the territory of the asylum proper began with another abandoned building, korpus 26. The doors were open and we visited dusty rooms that had been used for art therapy, still decorated with some paintings and potted plants, we examined dilapidated bathrooms, and we stroked some cats well fed by an invisible guard, finally ending up in a little interior garden surrounded by windows partly covered with plywood, overgrown with more or less moribund plants that a devoted hand was obviously struggling to save. Upstairs, in one of the therapy rooms, workers were building a structure out of pine boards. ‘What is it for?’ we asked. They had no idea. A few days later, walking by this korpus in the other direction to reach the forest, we came across a film shoot. Surrounded by projectors, several cameras and a crowd of technicians, a man in a leather jacket, standing in front of a luxury car, was aiming a gun at another man lying on the ground, his T-shirt soaked with fake blood. An assistant, catching sight of us, started bawling at us to clear out, but instead of turning back we hurried around the set and continued towards the grey wall of the psychiatric prison, along which a few technicians were sipping tea next to their equipment trucks. A gunshot resounded behind us, the only one we’d hear in Babyn Yar. That night, an acquaintance showed me some photos on his phone of the inside of korpus 26, which he had visited the day before: the upstairs rooms had been turned into a 1990s psychiatric asylum with beds, an office, lots of crockery and equipment – a fake asylum inside the real one.

51. After the abandoned korpus we headed towards the administration building. This is normal, every visit to an institution should begin with a courtesy call to its director. At the entrance, the guard made us wait, and I absent-mindedly contemplated his four large screens covered in a mosaic of views of the asylum, each little rectangle formed from a slightly different combination of grey and green, crossed sometimes by the dark grey of asphalt. Upstairs, we were made to wait again in a hallway decorated with portraits of the past directors of the asylum before finally being led into the office of the present one, Vyacheslav Danylovych Mishyev. It was a luminous space with pale-green walls decorated with paintings by one Volodymyr Slepchenko, with shelves full of books, African sculptures, orchids, Chinese vases. The affable director served us Armenian cognac and cookies as he told us the story of his asylum. At the time of the fall of Kyiv, in 1941, there were about 1,500 patients at the ‘Psychiatry Clinical Hospital’, which everyone still calls the Pavlovka, its pre-1937 Russian name; the asylum was placed under the authority of the occupying forces’ Department of Health, rations were drastically reduced, and the patients started dying of hunger. Then, two weeks after the massacre of the Jews, the Germans began to liquidate the patients. On 13 October 1941, 308 Jewish patients were shot by members of Einsatzkommando 5 above a mass grave in the Kyrylivskyy Hai. In 1942, they moved on to non-Jewish patients, hundreds of whom were gassed in trucks, about 300 in January 1942, then the rest between March and October, when the killings stopped, due to a lack of victims probably. The precise numbers are given in a series of Einsatzgrüppen reports which survived the war.26

52. As we left Vyacheslav Danylovych’s office, well-lubricated after our meeting, I went back to study the row of portraits in the hallway. They were all there, from 1941 to the present day, but one was missing, between the one whose term of office ended in 1942 and the one who had started in 1945. Immediately I thought they’d removed the portrait of a collaborationist director. The head doctor of the hospital, a certain Musii Tantsyura, had indeed been tried for collaboration in 1946.27 Yet in the portrait gallery in the hallway, Musii Dorofiyvytch Tantsyura, a slightly thickset man with a firm gaze framed by round glasses, and sporting a small, very late-nineteenth-century goatee, appears as the first director of the Pavlovka, from 1941 to 1942, just before Pylyp Danylovych Pashchenko, 1945-1959. 1941 and 1942 are precisely the years of the killings; the missing years, 1943 and 1944, are those of the return of Soviet rule. So my initial hypothesis seemed incorrect. Had there been a vacancy in management during the trials of Tantsyura and many other staff members? I was unable to find an answer to this question. Tantsyura and his colleagues had at first gotten two to ten years in a labour camp, before being found innocent and freed by decision of the Military Council of the Ukrainian Supreme Court; it had in fact turned out that, far from collaborating, Tantsyura had used his position to save many patients, urgently sending over five hundred of them home after the first massacre and altering the medical records of many others to make their condition appear less serious.28

53. Just before we left Vyacheslav Danylovych had called a nurse into his office, who was also treated to a drink. ‘The hospital is open to you,’ he had obligingly declared in front of her. ‘Svetlana Mikhailovna, show them anything they want to see.’ The complex is vast: dozens of buildings spread out over the long hill that ends the Kyrylivskyy Hai between Olena Teliha Street and the big ravine that borders the forest to the east, the Repyakhiv Yar. Svetlana Mikhailovna first showed us a korpus dating from 1919 and restored in the neo-Classical style, with paintings depicting Christ, Pontius Pilate and unclad women, closed and guarded by massive, authoritarian nurses as it was reserved for patients deemed at risk for self-harm, under 24-hour surveillance. Then we moved on to the 10th department, also situated in a Tsarist-era korpus close to St. Cyril’s church. In a dark room, a half-naked young woman was getting dressed; she came out to welcome us in a short, form-fitting blue dress; when we asked her permission to photograph her, she went back into her room and first posed standing, then sitting with her legs crossed on her bed, as if for an Instagram selfie. Further on, a small elderly lady addressed me in French with a perfectly good accent, a little old-fashioned perhaps; her first sentences were very clear and comprehensible, but then suddenly became confused, dissolving into gibberish, then once again becoming good French for an instant; it was unsettling. ‘Are you my son, Monsieur?’ ‘No, Madame, I am not your son.’ ‘I studied at the Sorbonne, did you know? At the Sorbonne, Monsieur. Tell me, is Édith Piaf still alive?’ All this, despite the sadness of these broken lives, was very pleasant, very neat, very nice, and we’d have liked to see something else, the wards crowded with clusters of patients pressing up against the windows, for example, beneath whom we’d passed on the way. But Svetlana Mikhailovna remained extremely evasive. ‘It’s too late today, you’ll have to come back. I’m sure there won’t be any problem.’ She was being a little optimistic. Antoine especially returned many times to this asylum to try to take photos there, but constantly came up against a wall of passive obstruction: when he arrived, smiles, cognac, friendly chats, after which they arranged for him to see only clean, orderly wards, full of calm, smiling patients on their well-made beds. It was frustrating. This little game continued during the war, in February 2023, when Antoine returned to the Pavlovka on commission for the New York Times, to photograph traumatized soldiers being treated there: one day, open access, red carpet; the next, existential crisis, absolute ban on working.29 On the eve of his return to France, I asked him to greet Mishyev for me. He wrote in reply: He was cool today because I was leaving and he was happy to get rid of me…

54. On the first day, Svetlana Mikhailovna had at least allowed us to visit the asylum’s morgue, a pretty little Tsarist-era building with cracked fuchsia plastered walls. In the first room, large cabinets made of old wood enclosed thousands of glass plates, biological samples still constantly collected from the patients and preserved for five years before being thrown out; the...