Survivors and witnesses of the Holodomor produced some four to five thousand accounts describing the Holodomor and the events leading up to it. They create a horrific picture of the slow death by hunger that was taking place across the Ukrainian countryside and provide invaluable information for researchers of the Holodomor. For example, the memoirs address the devastation that villages suffered, survival strategies, the role of local collaborators, regional variations, and the impact on families and children. For decades afterwards, the Famine could not even be mentioned in the Soviet Union, and thus the earliest published memoirs came from outside of Ukraine but were dismissed by some as the product of disgruntled anti-Soviet emigres. When Ukrainians were finally able to discuss what they had experienced, there was and numerous projects to collect testimonies were initiated. Today there is an overwhelming accumulation of more than four thousand accounts that testify to the suffering endured by witnesses and survivors and to the deaths of millions of others.

The HREC website features some of these collections of survivor memoirs and witness testimony, including the Volodymyr Maniak Collection and the Oseredok Collection.

The Volodymyr Maniak Collection

Volodymyr Maniak was a Ukrainian journalist who was an initiator of a project in 1988 that called those who had experienced the Famine to send in their written testimonials. He and his wife Lidiia Kovalenko received thousands of accounts by mail to their residence in Kyiv. The letters represent a rich source of information about the Holodomor, as they were some of the first responses to the Famine in Ukraine from the general public. Their significance is amplified by the fact that the Holodomor had always been a taboo topic in Soviet Ukraine. Many of the letters begin with an expression of gratitude for the opportunity to speak to the issue. The fate of the full collection has yet to be determined. However, Maniak and Kovalenko passed on approximately seven hundred of the original letters to a priest from France, Volodymyr Boichuk, whom they had met in Kyiv at the first conference dealing with the Holodomor. HREC is working with Father Bojczuk to ensure the preservation and accessibility of this unique and significant collection. To date, HREC has posted to its website scans of 124 of the letters with envelopes as well as transcripts, and English translations for 35 of the accounts.

Learn More....

The Oseredok Collection

HREC is supporting the publication of sixteen Holodomor memoirs from the archive of the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre (Oseredok) in Winnipeg. The authors produced the accounts for a competition held in the late 1940s for memoirs about the Second World War, but were compelled to address the horrific events of the 1930s. These texts are of particular value as they were written relatively soon after the Holodomor and reflect the experiences of Ukrainian intellectuals, teachers, and other professionals.

Learn More....