Black Confession
National Parliamentary Library hosts a book exhibit on the Holodomor
The National Parliamentary Library of Ukraine is hosting a book exhibition entitled “Black Confession of My Fatherland” commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor. Four sections-official documents, essays, research, and memoirs and fiction-contain over 400 publications that came out in the past 10 years in Ukraine (except diaspora publications).
The items on display include the Law on Holodomor, presidential decrees, works by the members of the All-Ukrainian Researchers’ Association for Holodomors in Ukraine and the researchers at Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory, monographs by famous historians Stanislav Kulchytsky and Yurii Shapoval, and, of course, the novels Zhovtyi Kniaz (The Yellow Prince) by Vasyl Barka and Maria by Ulas Samchuk. Three of the books are from The Day‘s Library series: Day and Eternity of James Mace, Why Was He Destroying Us? Stalin and the Holodomor in Ukraine by Stanislav Kulchytsky, and the most recent one-James Mace: Your Dead Chose Me.
Vasyl Marochko, head of the Research Center for the Genocide of the Ukrainian People, says: “This book exhibit is very important. Today you can hear people say something like this: ‘All they are talking about is the Holodomor.’ But this topic has not been exhausted. First of all, we have not buried millions of innocent famine victims according to the Christian rite. Their bones are scattered around Kyiv’s district Borshchahivka, under numerous high rises. There is a common grave with children’s remains on the territory of the OHMADYT Childrens’ Hospital in Kyiv. Half-dead kids were taken to the hospital and left there by local people on the hope that they would survive. In 1932-33 about 50 bodies at a time were buried there almost every week.
“These are not the only institutions that are standing on people’s ashes. We definitely have to speak and write about it. This tragedy will stay with us for a long time. It will ‘flash’ in different ways in different generations. This may be because we have to confess and repent of the sin of hushing up this tragedy for so many years.”
Oleh Bilyi, a researcher at Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory, sums it all up: “We finally started to master the culture of remembering. At the same time, we need to master also the culture of dying, keeping in mind the ethnopolitical aspects of the tragedy that are linked with the development of Ukraine’s statehood.
“Documents show that the 1932-33 Holodomor was an attempt to stop the Ukrainian people in their movement toward independence. Repressions against our religious, technical, and artistic elites in the early 1930s point to the same thing. This was done so that no protests would be voiced at the time when peasants — our nation’s economic core — were decimated.
“While mastering the culture of dying, we need to always remember that we also have to create the culture of living. Ukrainians survived, and it proves that Ukrainian identity is stable. Therefore, we are not a victim nation, but a nation that has held out despite everything.”
The book exhibit will be open until the end of November. For more information please visit the library’s site www.nplu.org.
