Spielberg calls home for poignant premiere

From Tony Halpin in Kiev

HIS films have brought home the horror of the Holocaust to millions. Yesterday Steven Spielberg came home to Ukraine to launch a film about survivors of the Holocaust in his ancestral homeland.

The Hollywood director's grandparents all came to the United States from Ukraine, but Spielberg had not visited the country before last night's premiere of the documentary Spell Your Name, by the Ukrainian director Sergei Bukovsky.

Spielberg told The Times that he feared that the "epidemic" of racism would lead the world into a new era to match the mass slaughters of the 20th century.

"Hatred comes from fear and we have experienced a century of fear and I fear that we are going into another century of heightened fear," he said.

"Until we get to the bottom of what makes people so afraid of the differences in others, and what we look like, we are going to experience an even greater century of fear."

Spielberg's arrival in Ukraine came a month after commemorations marking the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre in Kiev, when the Nazis murdered 33,771 Jews in two days. He said he had visited Babi Yar earlier in the day and placed stones at the memorials to those killed - a traditional Jewish act of remembrance. It and other massacres had happened, he said, because people had allowed them to. Tolerance was born of education through films such as Spell Your Name.

"It happened in the 20th century with the Armenians, it happened in Rwanda, it happened in Sarajevo," he said. "What is inconceivable to me is that as I look around at what technology has given us to shrink the world and make us better neighbours and friends, we often are not better neighbours and friends."

The 90-minute documentary records testimonies of Jews who survived the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. The $1 million project was funded by Victor Pinchuk, a billionaire Ukrainian industrialist whose grand-father left Kiev with his family shortly before the Nazis invaded.

"My parents told me that they knew friends and neighbours who found themselves at Babi Yar," Mr Pinchuk said.

He had been inspired by Spielberg's film Schindler's List to approach the director with the idea for the documentary.

Spielberg, 59, whose Shoah Foundation co-produced the film, said he was happy that it had given him an opportunity to visit Ukraine.

"I grew up in a home where my grandparents spoke Russian and Yiddish. I kind of felt that I had a piece of Ukraine in my own home, especially around dinner time," he said.

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