Here’s a piece of history most of us did not study in High School: The Holodomor. Never heard of it? Neither did I until a few days ago when the photo below showed up on my Facebook feed.
This life-size statue of a little girl holding a few stalks of wheat was made by sculptor Petro Drozdowsky and stands at the entrance to the National Holodomor Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine. The title is “Bitter Memory of Childhood.”
Here’s’ a quick version of the horrible story.
The Holodomor, or “murder by starvation”, was a state-engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–33 which killed an estimated 3.9 million people. Devised by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the Holodomor crushed the spirit of the Ukrainian peasantry and ensured it would never again rebel against communist rule on the scale seen in the 1920s & 1930s (BBC History Magazine).
The only way people survived was by hiding stalks of wheat from the soldiers.
I tell my students a new fact about Ukraine every day. What else have you learned that you didn’t know before?
Unbelievable!
Some people are just so horrible.