7 Lives - Echoes of Babyn Yar

“7 Lives – Echoes of Babyn Yar” is a collaborative contemporary chamber opera commemorating the 85th anniversary of Babyn Yar, one of the most devastating crimes of the Holocaust. In September 1941, more than 33,000 Jews were murdered at the ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv—a site that has since become a powerful symbol of both tragedy and the struggle for remembrance. “7 Lives – Echoes of Babyn Yar” is collaboratively created by young Ukrainian, Jewish and German composers, musicians, performers and visual artists and will be presented for the first time in Berlin on November 28. 

The opera reflects on memory, silence, and the struggle to voice the unspeakable. It avoids re-staging historical violence directly, instead focusing on how its legacy reverberates through generations: the silences that followed, the gaps in family histories, and the responsibility of memory transcending national borders. 

Structured in seven episodes, the opera will move from silence and absence, through a collage of archival fragments, contemporary poetry and personal reflections to a final part where voices in Ukrainian, German, and Yiddish weave together - not in unison, but in layers - underscoring the complexity of remembrance and opening a space for reflection. A young international chamber ensemble blends traditional and contemporary sounds, while a subtle stage performance seeks to create a living memorial that is not about the past alone but about how the memory of Holocaust challenges and unites young generations across borders—transforming grief into dialogue, speechlessness into music.