This bronze statue, titled Bitter Memory of Childhood, stands in the center of the walkway at the Holodomor Victims Memorial in Kiev, Ukraine, embodying the message that overreaching has consequences.
“Death is the solution to all problems. No man—no problem.”
—Joseph Stalin
In 2017 I traveled to Kiev, Ukraine, to interview two survivors of the Holodomor (“forced starvation”). In 1932 and 1933, Joseph Stalin, then general secretary of the Soviet Union, initiated one of the greatest genocides in human history against the people of Ukraine. Large regions of the country were blockaded and all food sources were intentionally taken or destroyed. In a span of twenty-four months, millions of Ukrainians died.
This post is dedicated to the first survivor I interviewed, Mykola Onyshchanko. The following passages are some of Mykola’s words featured in my book, The Seventh Power:
I belonged to a big family. We all lived together, and we were very happy. We lived on a large farm with lots of fields and horses. Life before the Soviet Union came to Ukraine was beautiful. We took care of ourselves, and everyone had plenty to eat.
Then the Communists came and took everything. They took all the horses, all the food, everything. Suddenly it was no longer like being a person. Those who resisted were dragged away. They were never seen again.
When this process was done there was absolutely no food; not even a single cow remained. There was nothing to eat. Soon we were all very hungry. At first, especially for a small boy, this all was very confusing.
By the spring of 1933 it was very, very bad. People all around me were dying and doing desperate things because they were so hungry. My mother told us about cannibalism; she would not let us go out in the yard that spring because she was afraid someone might try to eat us.
People were so thin . . . so horribly thin. They ate everything they had. Most people were barefoot because everybody ate their own leather boots. We boiled them in stew. I saw many people just fall down on the ground and never get back up. It was terrible, just terrible to see.
I remember walking to school one day and seeing some shit on the ground. In that shit was a single kernel of corn. I remember pausing and considering how I might pull out that grain of corn. I was wondering how I would clean it. After all these years I still remember staring down at that single kernel of corn.
The current Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion is not a new story. What we value for ourselves we must value for others. Freedom can’t be segmented and divided. When it’s threatened anywhere, it’s threatened everywhere.
Overreaching has consequences. Millions of Ukrainians died of starvation by Stalin’s heavy hand, and that quest for freedom is still playing out nearly a century later.
Freedom should be everywhere.
