Yesterday was Holodomor Remembrance Day and I remembered by visiting the art sculpture set up on the Manitoba legislative grounds. Flowers, sheaths of wheat, loaves of bread and sunflower seeds were scattered at its base.
Without collectivization, and the 'liquidation' of the kulaks, there would have been no famine. My kulak mom, born 1919, was 13 when rural Ukrainians were robbed of the means to feed themselves. Stalin sent his men to steal every last seed of grain from the farmers. He was determined to prove that communism worked and that the USSR could be a world super power.
It’s often believed that Stalin said, “The death of one (man) is a tragedy. The death of millions, a statistic.” (This has not been proven.) It’s a powerful insight, no matter who said it.
My mom and her siblings, considered enemy kulaks, had managed to leave only a few months before the government-ordered theft began. My grandfather’s exit visa, however, was not ‘in order.’ As he fumbled in bureaucratic hell, the famine broke out. I can only imagine what it would have been like for him … a fugitive, always on the run, risking the lives of others who would let him hide on their farms … his wife buried in Siberia, his children cared for by unwilling family in East Prussia. He avoided being a statistic of the famine, but not of the 1937 terror.
Now it’s 2025. Ukrainian people are again targeted. As writers and as readers, we can utilize the power of story to help the world see these deaths as tragedies and not statistics.
I recommend the following books for anyone interested in learning more about the Holodomor.
Winterkill by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder
The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest
The Memory Keeper of Kyiv by Erin Litteken
The Lost Year by Katherine Marsh.
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