CHILDREN TESTIFY

Kyiv Mohyla Academy Publishers, jointly with the Association of Holodomor Researchers, and with support from the Ivan Bahriany Foundation (US), has just launched Pavlo Hlushanytsia’s Viyna bez postriliv (A War without Shots Fired) and Ya nis tiazhky khrest ternystoyu dorohoyu na ukrayinsku Holhofu (I Carried a Heavy Cross on the Thorny Road to the Ukrainian Calvary); Leonid Mykhalchenko’s Lykholittia sela Novoselytsia (The Calamitous Times of the Village of Novoselytsia), and Ukrayinsky holokost. 1932-1933 (The Ukrainian Holocaust, 1932-33); the latter is a two-part publication compiled by the Rev. Yuriy Mytsyk. These new publications contain eyewitness accounts of the survivors of this horrible tragedy.

Every book has a story to tell. Pavlo Hlushanytsia, a Ukrainian Canadian, was one of the first in North America to commit to paper his memories of the genocide in Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Slaboshpytsky, the Ukrainian immigrant declared a personal war against the Soviet regime sometime in the early 1950s. He was proclaimed persona non grata in the Ukrainian SSR and in Canada he was accused of damaging Canadian-Soviet relations. In his newly published books, the author brings the reader back to the terrible events of 1933 in Novoselytsia, his native village in Zhytomyr oblast. The author provides information about literally every resident, and his memoirs are complemented by historian Leonid Mykhalchenko’s study of the same village, published at Pavlo Hlushanytsia’s expense. It is a record of events that took place not only in the ill-fated year 1933, but also in previous years, beginning in 1928.

Pavlo Hlushanytsia also helped publish the book on the Ukrainian Holocaust of 1932-33. Its author, the Rev. Yuriy Mytsyk, D.S. (History), was a little boy when his father told him about the tragedy. As an adult, he obtained more information from his relatives in Poltava oblast, but he knew better than to ask others about it. He returned to the subject in the early 1990s. As a history professor at Dnipropetrovsk University, he assigned his students to write a paper on the Holodomor the usual way or to collect eyewitness accounts. In the end he acquired enough accounts to generate a sizable database. Ukraine was gripped by a severe economic crisis, so publishing a book was out of the question. Some eyewitness accounts were published in the periodical press and some were transferred to the Dnipropetrovsk Regional History Museum. In 1996-97, when the Rev. Yuriy Mytsyk was appointed head of the History Chair at Kyiv Mohyla Academy, he enlisted other students in the project. The long-awaited book appeared in print thanks to various institutions in the Diaspora and in Ukraine. “As an historian, I concentrated on the Cossack period and the history of the church. Then suddenly I found myself meeting people who had witnessed the genocide. Their stories depressed me,” says the author. “The Holodomor claimed the lives of 9-14 million Ukrainian peasants. The 20th century is probably the most tragic in our history: two world wars, revolutions, the Holodomors of 1921, 1932-33, 1946-47, collectivization, resettlement, and deportation. I can’t think of another European nation that suffered as much, be it in the 18th, 19th, or 20th century.”

The Rev. Yuri Mytsyk is working on the third volume of his book on the Ukrainian Holocaust. He says he must hurry. The first eyewitness accounts were collected from people who were 20-30 years old during the Holodomor. Now such accounts are being provided by people who were children at the time.