For Valentyna Stanislavovna, who grew up in a Zhytomyr suburb and came to St. Michael’s Square last Saturday to pay tribute to the memory of those who were taken from her and her neighbors by the dreadful thirties, the green sprouts of the summer of 1933 offered a ray of hope after the numb famine winter: “We will make it!” She cannot hear without a shiver her granddaughters talking about how useful dandelion salad is: thank you, she had had enough of it in her day.
This Saturday she lit a candle in her window as a response to the commemorative action. Another was lit on the windowsill in Larysa Kostiuk’s apartment. Of eleven members of her family that lived in a village in Kirovohrad oblast seven died. Larysa still remembers her grandmother taking her through her native village: “...so many people from this family are buried under this wattle... And in this house everybody died that year...” People still skirt around an abandoned lot at the village’s outskirts: the woman, whose house used to stand here, lost her mind and ate all her children. There are many such stories in documentaries shot to commemorate the Holodomor anniversary, numerous collections of memoirs, papers at international conferences trying to find out the truth: is the death toll of 7 million people enough to be called genocide? On Saturday evening people were recalling the details of what they went through near St. Mary Orantha. But still most of the time they were silent or said prayers, crying silently. Hundreds of candles were lighted in the Saturday twilight give one a basis to say that this commemoration day will turn into a national tradition, even if not quite yet. It takes years to learn how to remember.
They say that the younger generations have a short memory. And the tragedy itself is referred to as an attempt to shorten the memory of a whole people. Today we see in some people’s reaction to the situation evidence that the attempt was somewhat successful.
Still, many of those who came to the square on Saturday and lit a candle later at home were young. Luckily for them, they know about these events only from books and eyewitness accounts. However, they can understand the terrible consequences: many of the survivors of the 1930s became afraid of fighting for their rights and got used to relying on the state instead of themselves. This is why such commemorative actions are needed more for the sake of the living than the dead.
In the morning the same day state leaders paid their tribute to the Holodomor victims by laying flowers to the St. Mary Orantha memorial. “The Great Famine came as a climax of mass repression in Ukraine, having all characteristics of a national catastrophe. Our people still suffer from its demographic, socioeconomic, historical, cultural, and psychological consequences. We claim — and the world agrees with us — that this was a catastrophe of a global scale,” President Leonid Kuchma stressed in his address to the Ukrainians. Our duty before the blessed memory of the millions of victims is “keep trying to bring to the international public the bitter truth about this famine, unprecedented in world history, so that the society of free nations will give a fitting evaluation of the tragedy, the intentions, and crimes of those who planned and organized it,” he said.
