wordy wednesday...holodomor {march 16, 2022}

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, these images have been making the rounds on various social media platforms. I have tried to find the author of this post, but it has been shared so many times and has become a herculean task to trace it back to its beginning.

Holodomor is a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor), death by starvation. 

"At the entrance to the Kiev Memorial Park there is a sculpture of a very thin girl with an extremely sad look holding several classes of wheat in her hands. Behind her back is the Candle of Remembrance, a monument with details reminiscent of authentic embroidery that can be found on traditional Ukrainian costumes. This is a monument that marks the historical event known as Holodomor. But what is Holodomor and what crime does this monument even symbolize?

At the end of World War I, Ukraine was an independent state, but it was governed by the Soviet Union in 1919 "sucked" into the community of Soviet states. Ukrainians, who then considered themselves a Central European nation like Poland, not an Eastern European like the Russians, were trying to restore Ukraine's independence.

Not wanting to lose control of Europe's main grain, Stalin in 1932 resorted to one of the most heinous forms of terror against a nation. In the process of nationalization, he took the grainy land from Ukrainian peasants, and all its yields, creating artificial hunger. The goal was to "teach Ukrainians" so that they would no longer oppose official Moscow. Thus, the nation that produced the most wheat in Europe was left without a crumb of bread. The peak of the Holodomor was in the spring of 1933. In Ukraine, 17 people starved to death every minute, over 1000 every hour, and almost 24500 every day! People were literally starving to death on the streets.

In the emptied Ukrainian villages Stalin settled the Russian population.

During the next census, there was a large population shortage. Therefore, the Soviet government abolished the census, destroyed the census documentation, and the census takers were shot or sent to gulag, to completely hide the truth.

It was during the 1932-1933 Holodomor hunger killed between seven and ten million people, more than Jews in World War II. Their toxic gas was hunger. Their Hitler was Stalin. Their holocaust was Holodomor. For them fascist Berlin was Soviet Moscow, and their concentration camp was the Soviet Union. Today, 28 countries of the world classify the Holodomor as a genocide, and you could not teach about it in school because almost all evidence has been destroyed, and the victim was silenced for decades and had no say until recently.

The Holodomor may have temporarily broken the Ukrainian resistance, but it made the desire for Ukraine's independence from Russia eternal." ~ author unknown

In all of my school years and years after of reading and trying to keep up with the news both at home and globally, I never learned about this event. It makes me realize that there are so many other events similar to this that have happened around the world. It is so important to continue learning so that you can understand.