A long-forgotten atrocity of the second World War is now remembered due to a poem and the music it inspired, writes Arminta Wallace.

TS Eliot wrote that April was the cruellest month, but if he were around nowadays, he might do his sums again and come up with September. It's a grim season for anniversaries. Before the first week is out, the Western world is plunged into what seems to have become an annual reworking of the dreadful events of the 11th; and the month ends with the commemoration of another dreadful event in our history, albeit one of which most of us remain blithely unaware. Every year, on September 29th, people gather at a place called Babiy Yar, in Ukraine, to mourn the deaths of those who were massacred there by the Nazis in 1941.

Babiy Yar is a ravine on the northwestern outskirts of Kiev. The Nazis occupied the city on September 19th, 1941; barely 10 days later, a notice was posted all over town. It read: "All [ Jews] living in the city of Kiev are to report by 8 o'clock on the morning of Monday, September 29th, 1941, at the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets (near the cemetery). They are to take with them documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc. Any [ Jew] not carrying out this instruction and who is found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilian entering flats evacuated by [ Jews] and stealing property will be shot."

The chillingly matter-of-fact tone was, of course, deliberate. Everyone in Kiev - including the Jews, many of whom turned up early in order, as one account puts it, "to ensure themselves a seat on the train" - assumed the notice signalled the beginning of an orderly deportation. Instead it unleashed an orgy of savagery.

According to official German records 33,771 Jews were killed in two days; but the killing did not stop there. Babiy Yar became the burial place not only of Jews but of Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians, Czechs, gypsies and prisoners of war. It was not unusual for dozens, sometimes hundreds, of civilians to be shot if one or two people disobeyed a Nazi order either in Kiev or at the nearby concentration camp at Sirez. Patients of the Pavlov psychiatric hospital were gassed and dumped into the ravine. Others, including pregnant women and children, were buried alive.

No one will ever know how many people died at Babiy Yar, but estimates put the figures at more than 100,000, including 40,000 Jews. The graves are now marked by commemorative monuments, including one to the children who died there; but when the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited the ravine 20 years later, the place was bleak and bare.

"I went back there," Yevtushenko said in a recent interview, "and there was not one sign of what happened. They were using it as a garbage pit! Garbage! That very evening, within three hours, I wrote the poem. I wrote out of shame."

"No monument stands over Babiy Yar," is the opening line of Yevtushenko's scathingly evocative poem. "A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone . . ." It goes on to identify the poet in a very personal way with the suffering of the Jewish race, beginning with the wanderings in the deserts of ancient Egypt and moving through Jesus, Dreyfus and Anne Frank, and ends with a ringing denunciation of anti-Semitism.

The publication of the poem Babiy Yar in the autumn of 1961 catapulted Yevtushenko to fame within Russia and, shortly afterwards, internationally. Shostakovich came across it in an official journal and, when he was hospitalised soon afterwards with heart problems and a broken leg, he made a point of reading more of Yevtushenko's work.

At home in his Moscow apartment, the poet got a phone call from the composer asking for permission to set Babiy Yar to music. When Yevtushenko agreed, Shostakovich said, "Splendid. Thank God, you don't mind. The music is ready. Can you come here right away?"

Babiy Yar became the first movement of Shostakovich's 13th symphony, each of whose five movements treats a different Yevtushenko poem. The other four are less overtly political than Babiy Yar, but their meaning is no less clear. One of them, Fear, with its lines about "the secret fear of being denounced,/ the secret fear of a knock at the door", must have spoken volumes to Shostakovich, who at one point in his chequered career used to spend the night in the corridor outside his apartment so that when the authorities came to arrest him they would not disturb his sleeping family.

Its passionate synthesis of words and music, plus the enormous forces generated by the combination of full-size orchestra, male choir and bass soloist, makes Shostakovich's 13th symphony a work of considerable evocative power. "It had never occurred to me," Yevtushenko wrote of the piece , "that [ the poems] could be united like that . . . in connecting all these poems . . . Shostakovich completely changed me as a poet."

The rest of the story of this astonishing piece of music ought to read: "and the symphony was a huge success and everyone lived happily ever after." In the shifting political sands of the former Soviet Union, however, fairy-tale endings were few and far between. Yevtushenko's poem drew parallels between the German atrocities and the officially sanctioned - and officially outlawed - anti-Semitism of the Soviet regime. Predictably, it attracted a vicious backlash from those who accused the poet of writing only about the Jewish losses at Babiy Yar and ignoring Russian and Ukrainian deaths; meanwhile the presence of Yevtushenko's words in its first movement ensured that the symphony, written to commemorate the victims of one paranoid and cruel regime, fell foul of another.

Indeed, it almost never saw the light of day at all. The conductor chosen by Shostakovich to premiere the work refused to perform it, probably for fear of the consequences if he did. The replacement conductor, Kyrill Kondrashin, decided to engage two soloists for the first night, even though there is only one solo part - a wise move, as it turned out.

On the day of the premiere, 15 minutes before the dress rehearsal was due to begin, the first soloist telephoned to say that he was cancelling due to illness. The second singer had not been asked to attend and no one knew where he was, but he happened to turn up some 20 minutes later. The show went on - but not before Kondrashin took a call from the minister for culture of the Russian Federation, suggesting that he might like to play the symphony without the first movement. He respectfully declined.

As Kondrashin recalled in Elizabeth Wilson's biography Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, "At the end of the first movement, the audience started to applaud and shout hysterically. The atmosphere was tense as it was, and I waved at them to calm down. We started playing the second movement at once so as not to put Shostakovich into an awkward position."

Nevertheless the official response was a deafening silence "It was not recommended for further performance," Kondrashin noted wryly. "In our country, musical works are not banned, they are 'not recommended for performance'." It is something of a shock to realise that all this took place less than half a century ago. And it's clear that in a world where the victims of massacres still go unmourned and political regimes are still paranoid and cruel, Shostakovich's 13th symphony still has a powerful message to put across. As Tim Ashley wrote in the Guardian, it is "one of the composer's most hard-hitting works - at once a demand that we learn from the past and a bleak reminder that Krushchev's 'thaw' failed to fully eradicate the excesses of the Soviet era."

• The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the gentlemen of the RTÉ Philharmonic choir and the Russian bass Nikita Storjev perform Shostakovich's Symphony No 13, Babiy Yar, at the National Concert Hall tonight.