I will Remember Them (the Holodomor)

[Valerie]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vndi4lTOhlE

I know I should read this but right now I know so many suffering I'm having a hard time opening this link up it sounds pretty tragic.

[Neto]

I debated starting a new thread for this, but since this covers the period soon after the Holodomor, I decided this would be a good place for this link to a book that was just completed. (It will not be available in printer form for anyone but family and a few other close friends, but it can be read on-line, or downloaded.)

This is one man's story of his experiences as a young person, going through the N@xi invasion of the USSR, and then the remainder of the war, as the Soviets took back the area where the Mennonite colonies had been, and then being taken into the German army as a teenager.

https://reflectionsof.jcvandyck.ca/read-the-book/

Maybe this will help explain the complexities faced when your home community becomes a war zone, with opposing military forces taking, loosing, regaining, and loosing again, the control over the area. May it be a call to ready ourselves to live for Christ, no matter what the political future holds.

(I haven't read it yet myself. I have only read small portions of it, as it was being written over the last several years.)

[barnhart]

Thanks Neto, that looks interesting.

[Neto]

Seeing this article just this morning, about the US-Russia plan for Ukraine.

I am somewhat surprised that Russia has yet to destroy this monument created to remember the Holodomor.



https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyx9xnpll8o

[barnhart]

Seeing this article just this morning, about the US-Russia plan for Ukraine.

I am somewhat surprised that Russia has yet to destroy this monument created to remember the Holodomor.



https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyx9xnpll8o

Perhaps because targeting it would draw increased attention?

[Neto]

Since this is Holodomor Remembrance Day, the following came up in the FB Mennonite History group:

Arnold Neufeldt-Fast
FB group, 2025-11-22
It is Holodomor Memorial Day
Holodomor: “death by hunger.” There is broad scholarly agreement that Stalin and his officials deliberately “magnified significant harvest shortages” into a catastrophic famine in Ukraine, 1932–33, “as an exercise in state terrorism” (note 1).
As able, I have been writing and researching on Fürstenland the last year, a daughter settlement of six villages less than 100 km downstream from Chortitza. The Rundschau editor was a Fürstenlander, and he received scores of letters from relatives and former neighbours, making Fürstenland an ideal location to tell of the Mennonite experience of the Holodomor.
The earliest letters: the hunger of the dispossessed—families of ministers or one-time business owners like the Jakob Niebuhrs (G# 111035)—was compounded by total material deprivation. They lacked proper clothing, shelter or a means to earn their bread. Their belongings—chairs, tables, beds, pillows—had been fully expropriated. Together with the handicapped, ill or elderly (retired lead minister Peter Lepp (G# 306427) checked all of those boxes), they were dependent on the kindness of others and the first to feel the deliberate infliction of hunger.
By late spring 1932, the unique pain of hunger dominated letters to Canada. Helena Dyck (G# 917481) wrote with stark clarity:
“We are healthy, but weak. Hunger hurts … people are starving everywhere. … I've swapped an overcoat [for food], otherwise we’d have nothing at all. There is actually enough grain in the storehouses, but it's all rotting while people starve. I just can’t tell you how bad it is here... We are all very thin. May the Lord protect us and help us all to escape from this place.” (Note 2)
For members of the collective farm, survival hinged on the meagre rations from the Stolowaja (canteen). Helena Kasper described a bleak routine: “I often go to the table in tears. Never a trace of meat... Mainly just groats and borscht—and then again without potatoes [or meat], just a little oil.” She learned that from November, “only the workers will get food.” Her fear was palpable: “Some, likely many, will not live to see the next spring, that's for sure—and we may very well be among them too.” She lamented: “We can't slaughter anything this year, we don't even have a hen. We have nothing, nothing at all” (note 3).
Large families faced impossible odds. The Franz Koslowskys (G# 417348) with six children were in “terrible poverty and are already starving.” The Peter Janzens (G# 1447077) were “naked and hungry.” In this context, the premature death of a child could be seen as a mercy. Kasper reported on the death of a young girl, Lena: “She will no longer be hungry and cold. Thank God for that. These poor children have yet to experience anything good on this earth. God only knows whether they will live to see the next spring or not.” Kasper added that whenever acquaintances get together, “we only talk about eating and hunger.”
Aid from abroad, coordinated by former Fürstenlanders like deacon Johann J. Fedrau (G# 170896) in Saskatchewan, provided a fragile lifeline (note 4). The state-run Torgsin stores, which accepted foreign currency or gold, became a crucial conduit. A gift of one dollar could buy 8.2 kg. of flour in Nikopol. When Kasper received two dollars in October 1932, she purchased 16.4 kg. (1 pood) of flour to “keep for the time when we have nothing left, because that time is coming.”
As the famine raged, arrests continued, compounding the tragedy. Anna Wiebe Isaak (G# 728798) wrote a heart-rending plea to the Rundschau after her husband was sentenced to six years of hard labour on December 31, 1932.
“I am sickly as a result of the difficult circumstances of recent years and now stand helpless with my 4 small children, without food and almost without clothing, and my husband torn away from the family, in need and misery." (Note 5)
A second letter confirmed the family’s desperate state: “Anna... and her four small children have neither heat nor food.” The writer added a chilling forecast: “According to human reckoning, many will die of hunger in Fürstenland” (note 6).
Winter exacerbated the crisis with a critical lack of clothing. Greta Unrau Braun (G# 1467702) recalled the profound deprivation: “when your dress was washed, you had to stay indoors till it dried because you had nothing else to wear. We all went barefoot” (note 7).
By the time most letters reached Canada, neighbouring Ukrainian and ethnic Polish villages were experiencing mass starvation. In Zelene—only 14 km from the Fürstenland village of Olgafeld—the entire population perished in the early months of 1933, according to Agripina Mykhailivna Myt' (b. 1909) of Upper Rohachyk. “There was no one to bury them. There was such a stench, and the wind was blowing.” Later that spring, survivors gathered the corpses, fenced off the village, and avoided the road entirely: “You couldn’t go in that direction.” Upper Rohachyk, 7 km from Olgafeld, fared only slightly better. “I also know that people, well, just fell down on the streets … and carts would come and take them away. And some of them were not even dead yet, they were still alive, but it would spare them to come back a second time” (note 8 ). While grain reportedly rotted in storage, the death penalty was imposed in 1932 on those who “stole” from the kolkhoz (note 9).
These are only a few of the Fürstenland memories, and they are by-and-large representative of the larger Menonite experience. Mennonites were co-witnesses and victims of the Holodomor, crushed alongside their ethnic Ukrainian neighbours in a deliberately engineered tragedy. Millions starved to death. Mennonites deaths however were limited with timely food assistance from abroad. Mennonite donations for food vouchers (redeemable at the Torgsin stores) were channeled through the office of Benjamin Unruh in Germany, and then through Berlin in coordination with the regime compliant German Red Cross, which received matching funds. One of the first donors in March 1933 was Germany’s new chancellor, Mr. Hit!er; it was not long before Soviet officials were deeming this aid as “Hit!er Hilfe (help).” The later implications of that (e.g., arrests) can also be documented in Fürstenland. But that’s another story.
---Notes—
Note 1: Jenny Leigh Smith, Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930–1963 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 22.
Note 2: MR 55, no. 35 (August 31, 1932), 7.
https://archive.org/.../sim_die-mennoni ... ./page/n5/
Note 3: MR 55, no. 46 (November 16, 1932), 6f.
https://archive.org/.../sim_die.../page/n5/mode/2up...
Note 4: E.g., MR 55, no. 52 (December 28, 1932), 7.
https://archive.org/.../sim_die.../page/n5/mode/2up...
Note 5: MR 56, no. 6 (February 8, 1933), 6.
https://archive.org/.../sim_die-mennoni ... ../page/6/
Note 6: A.A. Enns, “An alle früheren Fürstenländer,” Der Bote 10, no. 7 (February 15, 1933), 2.
https://collections.mharchives.ca/node/152156
Note 7: Anne Konrad, Red Quarter Moon: A Search for Family in the Shadow of Stalin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 134.
Note 8: Agripina Mykhailivna Myt', b. 1909 in Verkhnii Rohachyk, interview (Case History SW28), in James E. Mace and Leonid Heretz, eds., Investigation of the Ukrainian famine, 1932-1933: Oral History Project, vol. 2 (Washington, DC, 1990), 880.
https://archive.org/.../investigationof ... 0/mode/2up
Note 9: Cf. “On Safekeeping Property of State Enterprises [and] Collective Farms, 7 August 1932,” in Bohdan Klid and Alexander J. Motyl, eds., The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2012), 5:17.
https://holodomor.ca/the-holodomor-read ... cebook.../.

[R7ehr]

That is terrible.

[barnhart]

This slice of history serves to remind me that running toward political power for relief from other political power is quite dangerous. I can easily see how Mennonites from eastern Europe who suffered under the Russian empire would look to German Nationalism for relief and thank God for it, even though it would eventually prove to be a disastrous evil.

Be warned church, only Jesus saves. The rest are broken reeds that pierce the hands of those who lean on them.

[JohnH]

This slice of history serves to remind me that running toward political power for relief from other political power is quite dangerous. I can easily see how Mennonites from eastern Europe who suffered under the Russian empire would look to German Nationalism for relief and thank God for it, even though it would eventually prove to be a disastrous evil.

Be warned church, only Jesus saves. The rest are broken reeds that pierce the hands of those who lean on them.

It's odd how a memorial about the fact the Communists decided to kill 4 million people turns into tsk-tsking about "and remember, kids, Nazis are bad."

Sometimes it seems just saying "Communists are bad" should be enough, and perhaps it could just be a reminder that Mennonites and Christians should not look to socialists and communists for relief, and that doing so will prove to be a disastrous evil.

[Neto]

This slice of history serves to remind me that running toward political power for relief from other political power is quite dangerous. I can easily see how Mennonites from eastern Europe who suffered under the Russian empire would look to German Nationalism for relief and thank God for it, even though it would eventually prove to be a disastrous evil.

Be warned church, only Jesus saves. The rest are broken reeds that pierce the hands of those who lean on them.

It's odd how a memorial about the fact the Communists decided to kill 4 million people turns into tsk-tsking about "and remember, kids, Nazis are bad."

Sometimes it seems just saying "Communists are bad" should be enough, and perhaps it could just be a reminder that Mennonites and Christians should not look to socialists and communists for relief, and that doing so will prove to be a disastrous evil.

Yes, both are true, and BOTH need to be said. In fact, the same is true of ANY earthly kingdom or government. It was true of the Czar - he (they) were not able to protect the people from evil. Nor can any other political leader.