One Woman, Five Lives
Sometimes my life in America seems so far away that the memories of it appear to me like part of someone else’s biography, but then I get a reminder of that world — an e-mail, a phone call, or an old friend who needs a place to stay in Kyiv — and am brought back to the reality that the young man, who set out to research and explain the Holodomor , the Ukrainian genocide of 1933, at Harvard and Washington in the 1980s with all that went with the territory, was indeed I. This time it was a phone call. Eugenia Sakevych Dallas was in Kyiv to promote her book, One Woman, Five Lives, Five Countries, translated into Ukrainian as ... Ne vmyraye dusha nasha (...Our Soul Has Not Died: The Fate of a Holodomor Orphan). UT-1 Television was making a documentary about her and asked for an interview. The next day the crew arranged for me to meet this gracious lady, who had been interviewed by the Commission on the Ukraine Famine about fifteen years ago. The interview was rushed and said relatively little. The interviewer was obviously rushing to find as many narrators as possible and did not spend the time needed to help someone recall what happened to him or her so long ago. Leonid Heretz, who did the initial interviews for our oral history project and now teaching in Connecticut was an absolute genius in doing this. His successor was not, and Mrs. Dallas obviously regretted that there was so much she did not say. After the commission has fulfilled its mandate and gone out of existence, we met at some observance and she writes that I encouraged her to write it all down. As a historian I could do no other. An interview is always a poor excuse for a memoir, simply the best we can get from those who might otherwise not write their memoirs. And while both interviews and memoirs have their limitations as historical sources, contrary to the canons of Soviet historiography with which historians here grew up — there is no such thing as an authoritative historical source. The historian has to put all the sources together and try to figure out what happened and why. And in this puzzle, memory can tell us things that we can never get from the dry documents taken down by some clerc in the manner required to please his superiors.
Remembering pain far more easily forgotten takes courage, and Eugenia Dallas is a courageous woman. It is, after all, a very painful thing to recall that one was raped at ten or eleven, years before one discovers the eternal mysteries of sex. She was born into a wonderful world, that of the Ukrainian peasantry of the mid-1920s, when the peasants had everything their kind all over the world want, the best soil on God’s green earth and being more or less left alone to turn it into their own private horn of plenty. In fact, she is not even quite certain when she was born. Her parents were so happy at the birth of their little princess into a family of mainly boys that, as they say in these parts, even the chickens were in their cups, and the village priest forgot to record her birth. Then came dekulakization and the loss of her parents, who were guilty of tilling the soil too well; homelessness; being passed around among her brothers; shelters for homeless orphans; World War II; forced labor in Germany; and, with a resilience I have often seen among Ukrainians of that generation, landing on her feet, in her case as a high-fashion model and then a pampered wife.
Having passed through so many countries and been forced to deal with so many languages, she is acutely aware that he has truly mastered none, but her feel for words comes through in both Ukrainian and English. More importantly, in reading her book one gets the feeling that writing it was a healing process for her as a traumatized individual, her generation crippled by the same events, and by extension her nation, one that I have described as a post-genocidal society, in which the political realities of the day often preclude doing what objectively needs to be done to face the challenges of the time.
She told me that perhaps she had finished what I started. I respectfully disagree. She began what her nation will have to finish on its own, dealing with the pain of its scars from the past. Let others of her and later generations see her as an example of the healing process that the Ukrainian nation will sooner or later have to address. It will be long, painful, but necessary.
