“I was looking for bread…”: Kyiv’s Holodomor Museum receives copies of criminal cases dating back to genocide years
Pravda Ukraine
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry has handed over digitised copies of over 1,000 criminal cases from the Genocide years to the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv. [The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that lasted from 1932 to 1933 and claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainians – ed.]
Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s Interior Minister, says the archives preserve numerous testimonies of people confirming the brutal and ruthless crime against humanity – genocide by starvation.
He posted some quotations from the testimonies:
“During the famine of 1920-21, my family all perished – father, mother, two brothers and a sister – and I was the only one left. I was 18 […] I joined the Chubar collective farm in 1931 and have worked there ever since. I have no family; I live alone.
Back in April (I don’t remember the day), I got home from work; it was already dark. When I entered the house and turned on the lamp, I saw an 8- or 9-year-old boy looking for something in my absence. I asked him, ‘Why have you come here, and what are you looking for?’ The boy replied: ‘I was looking for bread…’”
“There was a case in which a collective farmer from the village of Rekechenets named Natalka Yuzvak slaughtered her two children and then ate them, one of them at Easter. If anyone asks the woman where her children are and why she ate them, she answers: ‘It’s none of your business. I couldn’t bear to see them suffer, and my despair made me do it. Shoot me, so I don’t suffer: that’s what starvation brings you to’.”
Klymenko says that almost a hundred years on, the Russians have not given up their goal of eradicating our identity, taking away our freedom and depriving us of our independence.
“Their methods are the same – terror and genocide. Deporting our children, torturing and killing, demolishing monuments, destroying our fields. We are painstakingly collecting evidence, documenting all the occupiers’ war crimes. They will definitely face justice for everything,” the interior minister said.
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