Akhmed doesn’t lock his gate at night. He doesn’t lock his doors, and he leaves his windows open to let the curtains twitch in the breeze. The night sounds with frogs and yipping dogs. Not so long ago, in his village of Baliiko* in the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, you could hear the Chechen War exploding at night in the distant mountains. A few years ago Chechens kidnapped the brother of a rich man in Baliiko for ransom, along with his friend; the friend was murdered in the woods when he didn’t run fast enough to keep up. In Nalchik, the Kabardino-Balkarian capital, roughly 20 miles away, violence in 2005 left scores dead in the city’s tree-lined boulevards.

Akhmed doesn’t lock his doors, but he is not a foolish man. He remembers being poor enough as a boy to experience the kind of hunger that drives children to eat grass while their parents toil on collective farms. In adulthood, he mastered the art of trade to sell the produce he grows. Now he works from before the sun rises until long after it sets to make a pretty home for his wife and daughters. Akhmed—a thick, strong man of 56 with an easy smile and a shock of white hair—knows what is important to him: his family. The endless conversation of birds and dogs and sheep and cows, the call to prayer that wafts from the local mosque at dusk, the flood of stars at night: This is the background of his life.

Akhmed’s world is not defined by war or the baroque nuance of ethnic identification. In an off-hand way, he has been known to say about the two chief ethnic groups of his region, “The Balkars and the Kabardians, they’re pretty much the same.” A Kabardian himself, Akhmed is simply not used to thinking of the world as divided into irreconcilable ethnic units. Many in his region—particularly in cities and capitals where power is parsed—do. Power grabs flared between Kabardians and Balkars in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there have been far more destructive clashes in other parts of the North Caucasus, such as Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan.

The Kabardians trace their history to great Circassian principalities, and the Balkars to Turkic tribes. Perhaps the more important difference between these peoples is that the Balkars were the traditional inhabitants of high mountain villages—where they raised horses, herded sheep, and grew potatoes and cabbages—and Kabardians were herders and farmers in the rolling foothills and plains. Traveling between mountain aeries and grassy farmlands, Balkars and Kabardians—despite speaking different languages—have worked together and traded with one another for hundreds of years.

Akhmed doesn’t spend his days fretting about who will get more seats in the local parliament, which languages dominate on television, or whether a particular dish his wife cooks is Kabardian or Balkar. He worries instead about his children’s health and education and prospects for happiness in marriage. He wonders if the price for cucumbers will rise if local government officials start selling cucumbers of their own. Or if some Chechens will come by and give a good price for radishes. Or if he will be able to trade tomatoes for potatoes and cabbages with the Balkars in the mountains. War does worry him, and he expresses concern about some of the more violent nationalist movements he’s heard about over the years. But Akhmed—born and raised in the countryside, far from the passions that drive power struggles in urban capitals—doesn’t define himself by how different he is from others. His first concerns, like those of so many of his compatriots, are deeply and intimately local.

Famous in history for the romance of its warriors and the diversity of its cultures and languages, lately the region around the Caucasus mountain chain—that magnificent topographic crush that marks the boundary between Russia and its southern neighbors Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—has been known best for its troubles. In the past 20 years, in Russia’s North Caucasus alone, two wars in the Republic of Chechnya have caused tens of thousands of deaths. Though Chechnya’s conflict began as a struggle for independence, as conditions deteriorated over time the conflict took on religious dimensions. Russia now has its own suicide bombers and homegrown terrorists, a reality that brings an existential sense of danger to authorities in Moscow, and to regular citizens as well.

There have been horrifying acts of terrorism, such as the 2004 attack by Chechen separatists on a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, that resulted in the deaths of nearly 200 children. There have been significant conflicts between the Ingush and the North Ossetians in the region west of Chechnya, and religious and ethnic violence regularly spills into the Republic of Dagestan, east of Chechnya on the Caspian Sea. Last year, Russia and Georgia went to war over the contested territory of South Ossetia—which has been a de facto independent state since 1991—and brought the region to the brink of international conflict. Even Kabardino-Balkaria has had its troubles. People across the republic were deeply affected by the violent clash in Nalchik four years ago. Some blamed an extreme version of Islam adopted by a band of disaffected youth; others pointed a finger at brutal police practices fostered by the previous presidential administration.

In Russia and, indeed, the United States, the Caucasus region—wedged between Europe and Asia, the vibrant host of Persian, Ottoman, and Russian empires over the centuries—has been reduced to the most caustic terms: It is a “tinderbox,” a “cauldron,” ruled by “fire and swords” and “ancient ethnic hatreds.” Many policymakers and political analysts take as writ that Islamic extremism is inching its way up out of Middle Eastern deserts and down into European plains. To this way of thinking, the Caucasus is all dashing, dangerous mountain people, fierce, half-mad, and out of control.

When we stop to take in the full, rich social world in and around the Caucasus Mountains, we get a different picture: It is not a place riven by ethnic hatreds, nor are its people wrapped in old ideas, clinging to poverty and resentment. Certainly there is tumult, but that is not all. If we look closely at individual lives, it is possible to see another, equally important picture of the Caucasus, where there is movement and the air of possibility, and where belonging deeply to a place fortifies people to move out into the world.

I came to know Akhmed and his family last year, while conducting anthropological research. I had met him and his wife, Haishet, a couple of years earlier through their daughter, Asya, a dazzling young woman. At the time she was teaching at the local elementary school in Baliiko, and I sat in on one of her classes; the students performed skits in English, clearly besotted with their teacher. When I returned on a recent trip, I was looking, carefully, for a place in the countryside where I could live while I worked. Eventually, after discussing matters with his wife and daughters, Akhmed said to me, “All our doors and windows will be open to you!”

My research in Russia began in the mid-1990s in a tiny village in the north, where I lived for a year studying social memory. I have returned to that village many times, and watched as the villagers slowed, nearly to their death. The sinking of that village into tangled grasses and bare ground has been a bewildering thing to witness. Villages die in that part of the world, and with them die the habits and ways accumulated over centuries. But in Kabardino-Balkaria, to my great surprise, villages seemed simply to bloom.

The first time I went to Akhmed and Haishet’s house, I was ushered into the largest room in their compound, decorated with rugs on the wall and a bright chandelier hanging from the ceiling. I was fed a rich meal of local dishes: meats—including rabbit, slaughtered in my honor from their own stock—vegetables, grains, and breads fragrant with garlic and herbs. Before the meal, the daughters of the family took me to their garden, a green expanse where tomatoes weighed down the vines. Haishet told me, “This is the girls’ work; it’s all theirs.”

Over time, I learned that there are poorer and richer families and villages in Kabardino-Balkaria. But there is no mistaking the air of freshness and youth there. In Baliiko, days begin as early as four in the morning and finish at the sunset call to prayer. In between are work and family meals and cleaning, and resting to get ready for more work. There is silliness and teasing between family members and guests. Nothing that I had read before coming to Kabardino-Balkaria prepared me for this: the presence of everyday thriving.

Statistics on the region paint a dire picture. In important and rare survey research conducted in 2006, American scholars Theodore Gerber and Sarah Mendelson found that unemployment among young males in Russia’s North Caucasus hovered around 30 percent (as compared with around 11 percent in the rest of Russia). In Kabardino-Balkaria, the figure was 35 percent. The majority of young men who responded to the survey said they did not earn enough money “to sustain themselves.” A Chechen man who came by one day to buy cucumbers from Akhmed told me, “This generation is broken. If you knew what really happened in Chechnya, your head would explode [with grief]. . . . Every family lost somebody.” Poverty and disenfranchisement are very real, but they are not the whole story.

Though statistics paint a dire picture, there is an air of freshness and youth in Kabardino-Balkaria.

Walking the broad streets of Baliiko, you see children playing with a tire, someone loading hay or hollering at a cow, dogs napping in piles of dirt, boys and girls smiling at one another with bright eyes on the way to the bus stop. But more than anything, a visitor sees straight dirt roads lined with benches and trees, and high walls punctuated by metal gates. No windows are visible from the street, no laundry hanging, no obvious domesticity. Normally, the gates are kept closed; they are only opened wide if there is a marriage or death. You would never guess that inside those gates there are sometimes up to three generations of a family.

Within these compounds Kabardians first understand the moral and social code they call khabza, which dictates how to behave rightly and with guakach,’ or “heart talent,” and young Muslims learn to wash themselves, cover their heads, and turn to Mecca for their daily prayers. Garden work is done that can pay for children’s educations or nicer clothes or Internet service. The money earned by old and young is pooled and, as needed, redistributed. Married couples with troubles come to elders for guidance; the frail, the ill, the young men without work or just back from obligatory stints in the Russian army, go there for healing. Survival and thriving, in homes such as these, are ensured by mutual obligations to family, to neighbors, and to the broader lineage clan.

One morning, while I sat writing in the compound courtyard, Akhmed put down a heavy sapling he was stripping to use as a pole in the garden, and told me the story of how he built his home. He’d grown up in Baliiko. His aged mother—the source of his and his eldest daughter’s strikingly pale skin, fair hair, and light green eyes—still lives two doors away. As a young man, he’d studied construction in a nearby town and had done so well that when he graduated, he had his pick of where to work, unlike many of his friends, who, in keeping with the centralized Soviet system, ended up in Central Asia or far to the north. Akhmed didn’t choose a bigger, richer city, but Baliiko. Home.

He was given a stony plot of land at the edge of the village and had to build his compound from nothing. And so he did. First a small set of rooms for living. Then another, larger living room, and a wash room with running water and cheery dolphin tiles over a bathtub. Then a little building to cook in. First one barn, then others, to house chickens, sheep, rabbits. An outhouse. The large garden plot connected to his compound was built up in neat rows over the years. There, he grows radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and green onions; cherry and plum trees and berry bushes bloom. Over time, a full compound formed where this family, like all Kabardian families in the countryside, could live securely.

Home has a mighty pull in the Caucasus: Much of life consists of forming, maintaining, and enriching the world that abides behind the gate. For hundreds of years, empires dealt warily with the mountain peoples of the Caucasus. As the poet Mikhail Lermontov—the great 19th-century Romantic of the Caucasus—mused, “Savage are the tribes of these gorges; their god is freedom; their law is war.” For Persian, Ottoman, and—as early as the 16th century—Russian overlords, these mountains presented a quandary: how to keep the peace with entrenched and able mountaineers and, at the same time, vigorously exploit them for resources, trade, and access to other empires.

For various empires, the Caucasus Mountains have presented a quandary: how to keep peace with the people and also exploit them.

Various strategies were used, including treaties and agreements, subjugation, and, when imperial armies were finally able to flush communities out of their high mountain homes, ethnic cleansing. In the 19th century, Russia attempted to clear the indigenous Circassian peoples from the mountains, driving many of them in a treacherous exile, to the regions that would become Turkey, Israel, and Jordan. The Circassians who remained behind were the ancestors of Akhmed and his family. In the 20th century, Stalin exiled four peoples of the Caucasus, accusing them of collaboration with the Germans in World War II: the Chechens, the Balkars, the Karachays, and the Ingush.

Today, Kabardino-Balkaria, like many parts of the Caucasus, is made up of people (and their descendants) who were forced to leave but came back, and people who managed to stay but now have kin living in faraway lands. Though home is a powerful vector pulling people toward courtyard, kitchen, and hearth, there’s a lot of moving going on. There are the Meskhetian Turks who returned to the Caucasus from Central Asia after their exile in the Soviet period; Balkars, Chechens, and Ingush live in nearby towns. There are those who live and work in Russia’s steppe country but return in the summers, hoping their children won’t forget their language and ways so they can marry according to the customs of 

. Many young men go to Moscow or St. Petersburg to work for a time and send home money; some go to Turkey for business, others to Egypt for religious education, returning with soft beards and polite handshakes and the new honorific of effendi, which means they can conduct religious rites in local mosques. There are those who return from holy pilgrimage to Mecca, now hajis and somehow changed.

In the Soviet period, Akhmed doubled his income by selling vegetables on a long trade route in his little green Lada for weeks at a time, winding his way through Penza and Saransk in Russia, Tbilisi and Kutaisi in Georgia, Yerevan in Armenia. While I was in Baliiko, five of us piled into the Lada and traveled to the mountains for a day to trade cucumbers for potatoes with a Balkar family he has known for years. Sometimes, this family is too poor to give him the potatoes they owe. But Akhmed brings his cucumbers anyway. An open, entrepreneurial spirit has lifted his family—and many of the people in his region—above the post-Soviet poverty that afflicted so many of his Russian compatriots to the north.

Years ago, Akhmed began building what will be his crowning achievement, a two-story house he designed himself. This is what Kabardians do: They build houses for years, sometimes never finishing them. In village after village, half-built houses peek over the heights of the highest metal gates. Akhmed’s half-house is currently used as a summer kitchen and for storage. Birds dart in and out of its gray, heavy structure, fighting with Haishet and her daughters over who will have control of nesting there. Akhmed has slowed work on the building lately. But there it stands, a concrete skeleton filled with the bright outlines of still-invisible futures.

Haishet, Akhmed’s wife, has black hair, nut-brown eyes, and a curl in the side of her mouth, ready to give way to a smile. She is constantly singing songs in Russian, Kabardian, and Hindi. These last, my favorites, she memorized note for note from Bollywood movies as a girl. She recites silly poems and serious ones. (She recited to me one she’d written in Russian, “Don’t choose a man for his beautiful eyes . . . but for a warm, good heart.”) In Kabardian, the word for “spouse” translates literally as “head-together.” Haishet is indeed the other head that meets and merges with Akhmed’s own. From early in the morning until bedtime, she cooks, visits with sick family and neighbors, and orchestrates the garden tasks as she keeps in mind the big picture: how to make a family function, a garden blossom, how to create order and hospitality.

Akhmed and Haishet’s household swirls with feminine chatter and laughter. Kabardian girls are raised to be modest and demure, and to respect hierarchies of age and status. At the same time, the girls fill the house with irrepressible ebullience. The eldest, Asya, fair of face and voice and mind, recently married a young man from Baliiko. She lives with him in Turkey, and visited home last summer in a happy whirlwind of stories about her new life. There is Marita, the second daughter, warm and open and also just married. She lives in Egypt with her husband, who is studying Islam at a theological school; she telephones regularly and constantly exchanges text messages with her sisters. Zalina, raven haired like her mother, and with an easy stream of laughter, studies Kabardian at the university in Nalchik and loves the arts; Liana, with a sweetheart mouth and freckled nose, studies physics and possesses a sure, skeptical eye; little Amina, who in her 17 years has bravely endured several operations to correct a twisted spine, now studies Arabic. Like the daughters in Jane Austen’s novel 

, these girls are placed socially by their virtues and talents.

For each daughter, marriage will be the defining adventure of her life. How will her talents and skills reflect on her family? What will her mother-in-law—a powerful figure in her new life—be like? Will the young woman master the new home and bring pride to her husband and her family? Or will she suffer bullying and debasement? Has she chosen a man of character? Or will he, in time, beat her or drink or shame her in other ways? Young women are, in a sense, the truest ambassadors in Kabardian society. They link one family to the next, one courtyard to the next, one clan to the next. They make the leap into new homes, new lands. When they are first born, girls can bring tears to the eyes of mothers for not being sons; in life, daughters cast themselves into the world, permanent pilgrims.

There is a Kabardian saying: "If someone strikes you with a stone, return the blow with bread."

And for the young women in Akhmed’s family, there are other kinds of pilgrimage. Though Akhmed and Haishet never learned a great deal about Islam, each of their daughters is devoted to exploring the religion. Kabardino-Balkaria has been, historically, a Muslim—specifically Sunni Muslim—region. Most people there today call themselves Muslim, but they mean vastly different things by this label. Some focus on moral law, others on political identification, still others on the poetry and mysticism of sacred texts. The Soviet period effectively wiped out a great deal of the theological expertise on Islam. But this purge never managed to affect deep moral codes such as those of 

, local in their orientation and wound into the symbol systems of Kabardian, a seemingly impenetrable language. Religion is complex in Kabardino-Balkaria; being a seeker there is a highly dynamic affair.

Renewed spiritual interest in Islam is especially apparent among the youth in the Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their parents look on their religious children with interest and sometimes a measure of puzzlement, wondering what this new devotion will mean. What are young people looking for? Order where there has been chaos in their lives? Holiness where there has been transgression? Belonging where there has been estrangement? Akhmed and Haishet—so respected, themselves, by their neighbors and kin—are supportive of their daughters’ seeking. While I lived with the family, Haishet would plan to serve dinner after the sunset call to prayer—as the first stars flickered into the twilight sky. In this way, she did her daughters the honor of letting them set the family clock.

The girls pray five times daily, though they do not attend mosque. Privately, they strive to understand what Islam is and what it should be. This is hard sometimes. They love to sing, but resist doing so because somewhere they heard that Islam forbids it. They are of open and warm natures, but they also wonder if they should be wary of those who are not Muslims. There are very few non-Muslims in their everyday world (only Russians and Ukrainians in the city, mostly), and the girls have learned at home to treat all strangers with kindness and respect. They love to dress in the latest fashions, but should they limit themselves to long skirts when they leave the house? Marita, now married, covers her head prettily with a scarf, but most young Kabardino-Balkarian women, including her older sister, do not. Here and there, the girls question the rightness or righteousness of certain customs of 

 that appear to contradict what they are learning. They seem to want simply to be good; religion offers new and dynamic aesthetics of holiness.

Amina listens to chanted verses from the Qur’an all day long on her cell phone, an instrument that also allows her to make videos and send text messages to her sisters in Egypt and Turkey—as well as her other sisters in the kitchen—which she seems to do ceaselessly. Marita, head covered, looks jauntily into the camera in photographs taken in tourist spots in Egypt. Their cousin Lena, who is studying law, has Muslim friends from the Caucasus who live in Brooklyn; she’s never met them, but they write silly letters back and forth all day while her cousins crowd around and comment. Asya, who had plenty of suitors before settling on her husband, said to her parents after one offer from a village boy: “I don’t want a garden! I don’t want a cow!” She was the first in her family to fly in a plane, and phoned them after she landed to tell of her amazing trip on the metal bird soaring to Turkey. From the inside of a village courtyard, the world opens wide.

In the Caucasus, the youth are moving. Akhmed’s daughters reveal the bright side of this fact, but the sons of the Caucasus carry dynamism’s heaviest social burdens. They are coming back from the army, looking for work. They are laboring in their family gardens and waiting for something better. A young man has lost a brother in Chechnya, maybe; maybe his family lost its wealth to some dark misfortune; he goes to Moscow to work, far from home; there is bad treatment there, sometimes. A young man who has no job, no wife of his own, is seen as somehow socially ill. But where will he turn for his cures? Religion? Drugs? Trouble? Where will his strong legs take him?

Just about anything could happen in Kabardino-Balkaria, even though it hasn’t known the horrors that Chechnya and other parts of the Caucasus have. Ethnic strife could return, or spill over from other regions. Religious movements could morph into something frightening. The pressures of unemployment and other disenfranchisements could turn young people toward antisocial behavior. What is clear is that there are choices.

One day, after a particularly large job was completed in the cucumber garden, we loaded ourselves in the Lada with a lunch and drove for a couple of hours to a famous waterfall, piling out of the car every several miles for photographs among the high, jagged rocks and cascading falls. After lunch, we started back home. The car moved slowly on the winding mountain road, thick with tourists and cows and donkeys and women selling wares and shish kebab. We were full and happy and getting sleepy.

We passed a Balkar boy on the road, walking alone, with a shaved little head—perhaps five years old. He looked up as the car passed, watching us with big brown eyes. Then, for no apparent reason but boyish mischief, he raised his hand in a rude gesture. What could this mean? Should something be done? Akhmed stopped the car with a jolt. Then he smiled and shifted into reverse.

We drew even again with the boy, and Haishet opened the car door on her side. In Russian—and looking straight at the child—she asked, “What is your name?”

The boy answered, assuredly, “Akhmed!”

Haishet gestured to her husband and said, “He’s Akhmed too. Here!” She handed the boy a bag full of tomatoes and cucumbers, left over from our lunch. Balkar villages, high in the mountains, are often poor. Cucumbers and tomatoes are costly and rare. “You tell your father that this is from Akhmed to Akhmed!” She smiled.

The boy took the bag. Haishet shut the door and we drove off. On the long ride home, Haishet sang Russian and Hindi songs, her pure voice arching high to keep Akhmed awake.

Later, when we were home, I asked Akhmed about the Balkar boy. “What made you turn the car back?”

He said, “I don’t know. He had an unhappy face. It was nothing for us, but something special for him. I wanted him to feel better.”

There is a Kabardian saying: “If someone strikes you with a stone, return the blow with bread.” When I lived in the north of Russia, in the small dying village, I learned another saying, “

,” or “Good comes through good”—the elegant answer to how to solve the battle between good and evil: through good acts alone. In the Caucasus, the sounds of war are heard periodically. Young men die; cities and villages are destroyed. Without words and in perfect concert, Akhmed and Haishet fight back.

*I have changed the name of the village and the names of its people.

 is senior associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute and a visiting scholar at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University s Elliott School of International Affairs. She is the author of

 Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village (2005).

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Ethnic and religious violence keep Russia's North Caucasus region in the news. A portrait of daily life in one small village reveals a richer, more hopeful reality.

They Call It Home

I’VE BEEN SPENDING TIME IN TWO PLACES THAT WERE, IN THE LAST CENTURY, TESTED WITH AWESOME VIOLENCE.

 One, a great ravine found now within the city limits of Kiev, Ukraine, was the site of one of the most deadly massacres of the Holocaust. There, on September 29 and 30, 1941, German occupation forces assisted by Ukrainian auxiliary police rounded up almost 34,000 Jews and shot them to death. The ravine into which their bodies tumbled was called Babi Yar.

The other place, the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, in south-central France, is up high and hard to get to. Living in relative isolation, its people have evolved their own folkways over the centuries. The actions of these villagers were almost unparalleled in the history of the Holocaust: Many of the region’s 24,000 residents helped rescue about 5,000 people, some 3,500 of them Jews and most of them children, from near-certain death during World War II.

Tangles of trees and harsh winds are part of both places’ stories. The roads through the woods of each led, in the darkest moments of the last century, to two spectacular precipices. In those moments, with their insistent swirls of killing in the name of nation or race or religion or class, there were still various roads to choose from. What road takes you to one precipice, or the other? Given the limits of choice and of will, how does one find the right way?

Kiev — still struggling to come to terms with its bone-filled muds — can’t be compared analytically to the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon in any responsible way. The places are so unalike, their histories so distinct, the nature of the surrounding violence of entirely different magnitudes. But in both locations, more-or-less regular people faced tremendous pressure to preserve their own well-being to the detriment of targeted neighbors and strangers. Their responses were vastly different. In considering the two side by side, I aim not to curse nor to praise any given people (who endured moral tests the likes of which most of us will never have to face), but rather to meditate on these questions: How do small actions of groups, in the aggregate, make huge differences? How can social habits — the things we learn from childhood and pass on to our children — teach us immunity to the winds that whip around us, terrify us, tell us that we must think of ourselves first?

What road takes you to one precipice, or the other? Given the limits of choice and of will, how does one find the right way?

 some 100,000 people had perished in the mile-and-a-half complex of branching gorges that make up Babi Yar; most of those people were probably Jews, but all, one way or another, were from reviled groups — Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, and Ukrainian nationalists. After September 19, 1941, when they captured Kiev, German commanders quickly determined that Babi Yar would be a suitable dumping ground for thousands of corpses. Of those gorges into which the bulk of the bodies were tossed, most have since been filled in, though some deep gashes remain. The bottom is so far down, you wonder if there isn’t a lower place to be found on earth.

It is a startling fact that life went on mostly as usual in Kiev after the massacre. It is also startling that the city doesn’t pay this massacre much mind today. Its history is hidden, as if in plain sight. If a visitor wants, she can arm herself with maps printed from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Web site, purchase a metro token, and take a train to the spot where on September 29, 1941, the Jews of Kiev were ordered to gather, and from there, were marched toward Babi Yar.

For decades, armies moving back and forth across the continent had pounded through Kiev — notably during World War I and the Russian civil war. It was also caught up in the famine of 1932–33, in which millions starved to death. The Germans had occupied Kiev during World War I, and some residents of the city, in the grim calculus of allegiances in wartime, welcomed them now. By late September 1941, the German invasion of the Soviet Union was only three months under way, and rumors about what was happening to Jews in particular hadn’t yet swelled to meet the true, horrible dimensions of what would become known as the Holocaust. So when signs on rough blue paper were posted throughout the city ordering “All yids of the city of Kiev” to assemble, Jews mostly assembled. They would be gathering not far from a rail line, so many thought they would be deported somewhere. Given what they and their neighbors knew and didn’t know, it wasn’t outrageous to think this way, even if in some parts of the city they’d already witnessed vile crimes at the hands of the German occupiers: An old woman was told to kneel on the street and was shot and killed; two guard dogs ripped a man in half. And there had been more ad hoc shootings, more chaos.

Fragments of the stories of those who perished remain in the memories of survivors and rescuers*: Ania, who sewed for a living and was very poor, had two dresses, one red and one yellow. She decided to wear the nicer dress under the older, frayed one, so that she could have something to trade for food and whatever else might be needed — travel permits, bribes — during her coming journey. Khava, who was, according to her friend Vera, “simple and hard working,” put on her faux yellow fur and softest scarf and told her neighbors she had dressed up “for the enemies.” Lalia’s mother begged her daughter — a Russian married to a Jew — to stay behind. “Would you stay behind if your husband was going?” Lalia asked her mother. “No? I won’t, either.” Ania, Khava, and Lalia were among the 34,000 who fell into Babi Yar.

Today, when you take the metro to Lukianivska Station, you emerge from the underground to a normal street scene of modern Kiev. There are kiosks where meat dumplings are sold, shops and banks, a McDonald’s, dogs sniffing around, political posters of a braided girl proclaiming “New Power to Ukraine!” and cars angling through the traffic. With your map in hand, you can start the walk down Melnikov Street, on a cold December day, on the uneven ice of the sidewalks. There are houses, ornate and painted green, that stood there in 1941, and others that would have come much later. You pass one apartment building, gray and crumbling with broken balconies twisting up its flanks, and you see, in faded red paint, the word 

 (glory), distantly calling to some brilliant Soviet future. You walk on bustling streets where thousands once walked in their specially chosen clothing, beside horse-drawn carts carrying the young and the frail.

At a certain point you cross a street, and the line of cheerful storefronts ends and the pedestrians thin. You start seeing boarded-up buildings, decaying brick and wood and corroded metal. You are nearly hit by a car speeding through an intersection. There are broken, rotting vehicles littering the yards. You keep walking, and feel suddenly that you are walking down, down, and further down. There is a graveyard on the left, and a great television tower in the distance, coming out of the ground like an 

 to Babi Yar, and the story was so wretched for both bystanders and survivors to tell, that for decades, little was said or written about it. 

 and in his ongoing research (from which I’ve drawn in writing this essay), historian Karel Berkhoff has painstakingly traced the steps of those 34,000 men and women during September 1941: where they stopped and waited; where they turned to walk between two graveyards; the spot where friends said goodbye forever; the places where they were beaten; the places where they gave their papers to the German soldiers; the places where they were stripped by Ukrainian police and then waited, nearly naked; the places where they were lined up and shot; the places that were thick with trees and those that were open and bare.

Memories of witnesses, however imperfect after the years, help us navigate through the events. Vera stole away at night with another girl because they wanted to know what had happened to their Jewish friends. Crouching in the shadows, holding her friend’s hand, Vera saw men drinking and laughing, sitting at a table that had been set up by the edge of the ravine. “We see,” she remembers, “in front of us, a line of figures in their underwear. White figures.” And then, she heard “

,” and the figures fell. Another line of white emerged and — “

Everyone seems to remember the blue placard that called them to assemble. Everyone remembers the crowds. One woman remembers a young girl of “wondrous beauty,” together with her brother or husband, walking with the others on the way to their deaths. An old man was tossed by his beard over a fence; the beard remained in the hand of the soldier who threw him. A “glamour girl” named Sarah was taken into the woods by a group of soldiers, alone.

Did this tragedy happen because people in Ukraine hated Jews vividly and actively — so much that they were willing to witness, to stand by, and in some cases to aid in this unspeakable crime? The question itself is epistemologically knotty, but what can be said is this: A particular kind of animus toward Jews had long existed in Ukraine, with its history of pogroms that had flared from time to time in its cities and countryside, and of periodic rages among elites who blamed Jews for the political troubles of the day. This animus was like a well-worn garment that could be donned when convenient and politically expedient. But it was not all there was.

There were also friendships, marriages, and other unions that knitted Jews to their neighbors; fellow feeling and instances of sacrifice are woven throughout stories of survivors. In feats of individual heroism, thousands in Ukraine rescued Jews during World War II. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and research center in Jerusalem, has honored 2,402 people from Ukraine as “righteous among the nations.” Here, in Kiev, was a murderous invasion of outsiders, and regular people now needed to decide what to do as they peered out windows to watch their neighbors walk down Melnikov Street. Clearly, neither individual acts of heroism — as significant as they were — nor individual attachments were enough to protect the people of Kiev from the calamity unfolding in their midst. People were bound by ties of marriage or friendship, but not enough in the aggregate.

On March 13, 1961, there was a mudslide in Kiev. For years, a brick factory had been dumping its waste into the ravine at Babi Yar, which still held the remnants of blood and bone from the 1941 catastrophe. At one point there were heavy rains; the dam holding the waste burst, and that awful soil overflowed. Mud flooded the streets below, oozing into houses and industrial buildings, engulfing automobiles, knocking over streetcars, and killing, according to estimates, 1,500 to 2,000 people. As the ground flooded, some residents remembered the killing fields, finally, out loud. “Babi Yar revenge,” they said.

Not long ago, on a silver-gray December day, I found myself in what is now the expansive public park called Babi Yar. There were rows of leafless trees along an 

, pathways that led to forest, others to open spaces. Women walked by with prams. Evidently, the park had been used for carousing: Refuse was everywhere. Here and there stood official memorials, garish and unsolemn, for those killed at Babi Yar — “To the children,” “To the citizens of Kiev.” One, a monument to Soviet citizens and POWs, had cast in bronze horror-images of people falling and dying. There were also makeshift shrines: a cross with a plastic bouquet of roses, an unadorned wooden cross. A crow flew by. For decades, Soviet authorities suppressed mention of the particular crimes against Jews; the main memorial that does focus on Jewish victims — a large metal menorah constructed by Jewish groups in 1991 — was littered with frozen sputum. As I stood near the menorah, the silence of the place was shattered by cacophonous barking: A group of dogs encircled another dog, and attacked it.

Many of the ravine’s draws have been covered over in the years since 1941. First, dirt was tossed over the corpses, which were excavated and burned. Then the ground was leveled. I wandered for a time in the park among the prams, through the garbage-strewn paths and then some woods, and finally found a true precipice. The earth was carved to an edge. The trees rooted below came up to meet me, and the mournful ash-colored trunks with their black branches looked like skeleton fingers reaching toward the smoky heavens. Standing at the edge, I thought: No monument could be as true as the act of looking down, and then up.

On my way out of the park, I saw an assembly of shiny black crows walking over a floor of rotting leaves, looking, perhaps, for grubs. With sharp beaks, they delicately, soundlessly picked up matted piles of leaves, turned them over, and slowly placed them down again.

Turning the other cheek is a social act. Done collectively, it becomes a transformative social act.

the climate is mean: In winter, snows and snaking winds humble the approaching stranger. Once you settle into the farmlands of the plateau, it feels like a cradle, but if you travel around its roughly 30-mile perimeter, you meet with dizzying drops toward a river. And yet, during World War II, thousands of refugees made the climb up here.

Some came from the Warsaw ghetto. Others came from Paris, the petted children of artists or merchants. Some had seen family shops and community temples shattered during the orchestrated pogroms that took place all over Germany and Austria on the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938 — hearing screams of 

 (Jew pig!). Some had seen their mothers beaten by soldiers, had seen their mothers’ teeth knocked out. Still others had already been to concentration camps and been clubbed by guards or had watched older, more powerful prisoners kick over their bowls of food around a shared outdoor fire. After the mad exodus south following the German invasion of France in 1940, many had already witnessed the quick hierarchies of hiding and captivity established among those who spoke Yiddish, or French, or German, enjoying the attendant advantages of making community through trust and trade; those from rich families, or not; those who knew how to break rules and those who held onto them; those who had traded all their jewelry for a train ticket; those who had lost the loves of their lives. They’d hidden in church attics and among the roots of trees in the woods. They’d seen cattle felled by machine-gun fire, and some had seen, for the first time, dead human bodies. Most had had a brush with the end — before some soldier let them pass by, some attic was offered, some lost mother or brother was miraculously found.

One after the other, the refugees found their way to the plateau. Word had spread. There was a set of villages where people were taking in Jews: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Le Mazet-Saint-Voy, Tence, Saint-Agrève, Fay-sur-Lignon, Montbusat, and other places — towns, hamlets, even lone homesteads. They’d heard there would be schools for children, farmhouses with room for hiding, ways to obtain false documents and secure passage to Switzerland and safety.

Before German troops moved into the unoccupied portion of collaborationist Vichy France in late 1942, it was still possible for humanitarian and religious groups to gather children from concentration camps in the south and to find places where they might be safer, away from their parents. The plateau became one of the well-known destinations for those children, but also for many other people who had simply found their way by rumor: 

Up their trains climbed onto the plateau. And what were they met by? Rock cliffs wet with moss, pine trees, odd jutting volcanic hills, green farmland. Wind, whipping through the forest and over the fields, pounding against stone houses with walls three feet thick. And in winter lay snows so immense that some saw the stuff as if for the first time in their lives. In the villages of the plateau were narrow streets, more stone buildings, small town squares where locals rinsed their laundry in the public fountain, and stores where old men would gab away the day. In Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the trains would stop and residents would meet the refugee families and find homes for them. From there, streets wound down to the Lignon River, and up toward forests and waterfalls. And on the way to the river, the single Protestant church met the refugees, too, its stone walls bare except for an incised command: 

Among those greeting the refugees were dairy farmers with startling blue eyes, and refugee children, already arrived, who now came to the train station to bring the newcomers to farms by sleigh. There were the volunteers who’d arrived from other parts of France and even other countries to help in this rescue — some for religious reasons and others because they saw in this work a chance to help with what one young volunteer, Daniel Trocmé, called the “reconstruction of the world.” Once they arrived, these refugees were given what was, to survivors, a never-forgotten kindness: They came to the door of a stranger, and the door was opened.

Once there, refugees found work; many joined the rescue effort, teaching in schools, caring for the weak, procuring false documents. To various degrees, they joined the community. In the late 19th century, the plateau had become a tourist destination for those seeking respite from the noxious air of large French cities. Because of this, housing and supporting infrastructure existed that could now be transformed into makeshift family homes and schools for the flood of outsiders.

If the refugees were children, they went to schools and made friends. The ones without parents would weep at night or wet the bed or howl for food; in time, they would learn to play among the jumble of languages now spoken on the plateau. They would learn the contours of the farmhouses and streets and rivers and hills. For the first time in their lives, city children carried buckets of water and bales of hay.

Nearly everyone on the plateau was, one way or another, involved in this rescue effort — not only its Protestant majority, but also Catholics, Jews, and nonreligious humanitarians — and their participation carried risks. The German army knew in general terms about the rescue, and occasionally they would act. Some pastors endured extra risk; after years of travel in foreign countries, pastors André Trocmé and Edouard Theis would boldly bring to the pulpit ideas about nonviolent resistance that they’d embraced in those travels. Other pastors would quietly plot with their parishioners the dangerous tactics and techniques of rescue. In 1944, German soldiers went on a rampage, killing farm workers and burning a house down. There was the dashing Roger Le Forestier, a physician who had come to the plateau after fighting leprosy in the Belgian Congo alongside Albert Schweitzer. Now, for his work in rescue and resistance, he was arrested, sent to the infamous Gestapo prison in Lyon, and shot and killed. In June 1943 at the Maison des Roches, a children’s home, 18 young men were sent to detention camps alongside the home’s director, the bespectacled Daniel Trocmé. Trocmé, who was later called “un garçon merveilleux, a hero, a 

” by a survivor, had refused to leave his charges. After several months spent moving from camp to camp, from country to country, writing letters to his parents with messages to the children he’d left behind in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, he fell ill and died in Majdanek, a camp in Poland. Five of the boys, the ones who were determined to be Jewish, were sent to the French transport camp, Drancy, and then to Auschwitz, where all were murdered.

But most days, life was as normal as could possibly be imagined in that merciless period. By the time the Germans lumbered up the hills, alarms would sound and dogs would start barking madly. The children would be told to go into the woods to look for mushrooms — sometimes with no sense of the immediate danger.

FOR YEARS, I HAVE BEEN LOOKING CLOSELY AT SMALL COMMUNITIES 

to see how they react to large, powerful, and violent states. Sometimes, remarkably, those communities resist the will of larger forces to perpetuate violence. What are, in detail, the social foundations of nonviolent communities? How do they come into existence, and how can they remain resilient and robust once they do?

Perhaps the first thing to understand about Plateau Vivarais-Lignon is that the community has been taking in strangers — persecuted, or poor or ill — for centuries. The villagers know how to do it; they possess the knowledge as a habit and a skill. Since the 16th century, the plateau has been home to a great number of Protestants. Up in hard-to-reach hills and far from the center of French rule, the Protestants on the plateau sheltered their coreligionists or shuttled them to safety during the gruesome struggles of the Reformation that marked the end of Roman Catholic hegemony. Many of the present-day plateau dwellers are descendants of the Protestants who remained in the region. Studies of altruism — found in the sociology of Samuel and Pearl Oliner and Nechama Tec, for instance, and in the social psychology of Eva Fogelman — don’t show that Protestants are necessarily more likely to perform altruistic acts than others. They do, however, find that one social feature that seems to encourage heroic altruism is the experience of having been an outsider, or a minority, or persecuted oneself. Altruism fares best, in other words, among those who have been treated badly and have decided that treating others well is best for all. Martin Luther King Jr. said repeatedly that turning the other cheek is a social act. Done collectively, it becomes a transformative social act.

As Vichy authorities questioned him about the Jews living on the plateau, Pastor Trocmé said, “We don’t know what a Jew is, we only know men.”

After the French Revolution, these same Protestant villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon protected Catholic priests who fled the new regime. In the late 19th century, children from nearby industrial cities were brought to the plateau — increasingly known for its fresh, salubrious air — for healing, and a home was opened that welcomed needy children from the south of France and refugee children from Algeria. During World War I, children arrived from the disputed territory of Alsace, and the 1930s brought more refugees, from the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, Jews came, of course, but also German soldiers who refused to fight, communists, and other political exiles. After the war, people came from Hungary, Chile, Tibet, and other countries. Today, a local branch of France’s Centre d’accueil pour demandeurs d’asile (Reception Center for Asylum Seekers) hosts families from Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Kosovo, Serbia, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and Chechnya.

When you arrive at a door on the plateau, the people opening it don’t ask what kind of person you are. As Vichy authorities questioned him about the Jews living on the plateau, Pastor Trocmé said, “We don’t know what a Jew is, we only know men.” So in the summer of 1941, it didn’t matter that Elizabeth, who’d traveled an odyssey from Vienna, was Jewish. It didn’t matter that Peter, who was from Berlin and was to lose both parents to Auschwitz, was Jewish either. Or that Pauline would walk into the forest with other Jews of the plateau, to celebrate Sukkot in secret. Years later, Simon, who’d come from Paris to live in a farmhouse, would say, “For me, Le Chambon was the town that made me happy, that gave birth to me … intellectually and religiously. Bizarrely, I became Jewish there in the sense of seeing and researching Judaism.” But no one asked Simon about his Jewishness, and no one asked Hans, who arrived already religious. Still a teenager when interned at the French concentration camp, Rivesaltes, he had volunteered to carry the dead to the morgue, to ensure that part of the solemn Jewish burial rites would be performed for them.

Hans was Jewish, but he could have been any refugee when he arrived on the plateau with a small group of other boys and started attending school. He was a resident of the Maison des Roches, where he lived with a couple dozen charges from places such as Poland, Germany, Holland, Spain, Belgium, Lithuania, and Persia. His parents would be sent away on a transport to Auschwitz from Drancy, and he would never see them again. But years later, Hans spoke of how he still believed in God and miracles, and the necessity of love for mankind, and the way people lived the dictum of “love one another” on the plateau. He and his wife still performed their own ritual each night: “Before we go to sleep, we hold hands and we kiss goodnight and we say, ‘Never again.’” This is where, telling his story, Hans finally wept.

His rescuers quietly brought some measure of normality to an awful situation. What does normal look like on the plateau? It looks like hard work and well-ordered days of family life. It looks like up-close interactions with fields, trees, and skies. I notice a kind of affable detachment, an uprightness, a clear-eyed kindness. I notice a love of routine and schedule and long midday meals. They are friends, in deed, when ice freezes the pipes and cars break down.

Is this what the groups who open doors always look like? Are they always in faraway villages where modest people speak a homely patois? History and geography have shown that if these villagers have been stubbornly peaceful, others have made pogroms. It’s not the village or the mountain, or even the simple ways that seem to matter most. It’s the fact that this set of villagers learned, over time and as a group, to make this principle routine: To show kindness to a stranger, to offer her your cloak, to return his blows with affection, even in the direst circumstances. They learned to make actual what Jews on the plateau would have known as tikkun olam, repairing the world.

Against the rooted normality on the plateau, there are everyday troubles, as well as the fiercer ones that come with taking in traumatized people. But these trials are not weighed against the matter-of-fact practice of sheltering needy outsiders. As a friend told me one night by the orange light of a fire in her family hearth — she, the pale-skinned, blue-eyed granddaughter of farmers who protected Jews during the war — the important thing to do when you open a door to strangers is to have faith. Not faith in the person behind the door, she told me, but faith that all will be, somehow, as it should.

The equation there shifts away from the quick calculations of rational choice: It is a faith in something higher and unseen and absolutely just. “Love one another” is thereby a technology of moral choice. The remarkable things that happened on the plateau during the war didn’t occur because people there were angels or because they were French, but because they had cultivated an altruism that is a near banality of goodness. It is a habit that relies on tiny, everyday acts that, in the aggregate, have meant something astonishing, have led to something monumental, something that could make an old man weep with gratitude.

Here are two precipices: Babi Yar and the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. Babi Yar — and its bones of one hundred thousand souls. The plateau — and the souls of five thousand who were preserved to have lives and fortunes of their own, with children, and children’s children, and the rest. With the unfolding of time, those five thousand will surely give rise to one hundred thousand more. And these will carry the mark of the blessings and prayers of their forebears: Love one another and Never again.

* All quotes of survivors and witnesses were drawn from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, to which I had access while I was the Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance Research Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. All translations from Russian and French are mine.

Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village

 (2005). A visiting scholar at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Elliott School, George Washington University, and a senior associate at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, she is currently writing a book about the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon.

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During World War II, villagers in a French farming community rescued thousands of Jews and other refugees, while most Europeans spectacularly failed to hinder the genocides in their midst. What set the villagers apart?

Margaret Paxson