(solemn music) - You hear over and over again to never forget.

Never forget.

And I think that this is one way of keeping that.

The idea being so that it never happens again, but unfortunately it is happening again.

And that's the part that I don't get, why does it have to happen again?

I think our duty is never forget.

(solemn music continues) - When I was growing up, it was a sacrilege to throw out stale or old bread.

You always had to throw it out for the birds.

And I remember when my grandparents passed away and we were cleaning out their house in Northeast, and we found like these, like a linen napkin with crusts of bread in it.

And then they were tucked up in the rafters, like in the garage, in the house, so that they would never have to go hungry again.

- My mother was born in Eastern Ukraine, 1923, into a farming family.

Her father, my grandfather, was a farmer, a successful farmer.

She loved to dance.

She loved running around barefoot on the farm.

But you know, the famine began when she was nine.

And that was kind of the end of a happy-go-lucky childhood for her.

- [Zorianna] 90 years ago, Soviet leadership organized a genocidal famine to destroy the Ukrainian nation and steal its agricultural wealth.

Ukraine's spiritual and intellectual leaders were thrown in prison, and millions of farming families were starved to death.

Ukrainians in Minnesota and around the world commemorate the victims of that famine they call the Holodomor.

(choir sings in Ukrainian) - Imagine yourself living in “Leave it to Beaver” America.

This is the '50s.

Everything's just wonderful and perfect.

Imagine coming from where my mom came from, torture, starvation, murder.

If the women were off talking about Holodomor, they would send the kids away.

They didn't want the kids listening to this.

My older sister, I know, she would sneak back and listen.

Each woman would then say, "Yeah, and in my family, my brother died," or "All the siblings died," or "Everybody died."

And they just go through this list of everybody in the family, and then the next woman say, "Yeah, in my family so and so died," or "so and so died."

Kids never talked about this with each other.

I mean, it just gets passed on, this silence.

- I was young and I remember having family dinners or holidays, and we would have people from the community over and they would sit at the end of the table and of course they would talk about all the people that they lost, family members, and they would get very sad and they would start crying.

And I'm just a little kid.

This is supposed to be a joyous occasion, Christmas.

I'm just a little girl.

I'm just a little kid, so I don't understand it, until I became older and learned about it more.

- [Zorianna] For centuries foreign powers laid claim to Ukraine's territory.

At the start of the 20th century, Ukraine was divided, ruled by Russia in the east and the Austria-Hungarian empire in the west.

Yet Ukrainian farmers kept alive their Ukrainian language and ancient national traditions in spite of ongoing repression and neglect.

(choir sings in Ukrainian) - [Zorianna] In 1918, Ukraine celebrated a short-lived independence.

A year later, eastern and western Ukraine were united for the first time in 300 years.

But the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic faced enemies on all sides.

Outmatched, Ukraine, once again, found itself divided, this time among Bolshevik Russia, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.

After the Revolution, the Red Army confiscated Ukraine's agricultural output to feed Russian cities.

But Bolshevik leader Lenin worried about keeping freedom-seeking Ukrainians under Moscow's control.

- Soviets were coming in and taking their land against their will.

My grandfather was an elder in the village.

They had an assembly meeting and he said, "Let's oppose this.

Let's create an uprising.

This isn't right.

They can't take our land, they can't take our houses, our barns, our livestock, our crops."

The Soviets heard about this, the Soviet communists.

They jailed him and he escaped.

They jailed him a second time.

and they beat his legs with the butt of a rifle so he would not escape.

So till the day he passed away at age 93, he always had circulation problems in his legs.

(person sings in foreign language) - During the Great Depression, the Ukrainian community centered around two parishes, St. Michael's and St. Constantine's, just a few blocks away from each other.

They held endless dinners, bake sales, bazaars to raise money for the Ukrainian cause.

Two of the important places that they participated in where there was a larger audience was at the Festival of Nations and at the state fair.

- [Zorianna] Under Lenin's successor, Stalin, the communist party introduced a five-year plan that forced private farmers to hand over their land, machinery and farm animals to collective state-run farms.

The state would use the revenues to pay for rapid industrialization.

- Mrs. Paczkowski, or as we called her, Pani Nilla, 'cause Neonilla was her name, she was a dear close friend of my mom's.

Mrs. Paczkowski is here, and that's my mom in the wheelchair.

And the scarf that my mom is wearing is, I saved it.

And so I'm wearing it now to be able to feel their closeness, feel their spirit, as I share Mrs. Paczkowski's memories.

(gentle music) "The first thing I remember is the word collectivization, said in a whisper and with fear.

My grandfather told my father to get a job on the railroad.

He also said, and this struck us all like a thunderbolt, that he was giving away, voluntarily, his farmstead and land cows, oxen, sleighs, and carriage to the collective farm.

He said, maybe with this action, they would leave us alone for a while."

- You have a system of farms being formed where the formerly independent farmer becomes basically a hired hand who has very little or no say in the affairs of the new collective farm that's being established.

If you were a private farmer, in order to incentivize you to finally give up, you were taxed to death.

If you were unable to meet your obligations, your land and possessions were subject to confiscation.

- [Zorianna] Those who resisted were labeled Kulaks, exploiters and class enemies.

Stalin's secret police imprisoned or deported hundreds of thousands of farmers and drove their families from their homes - Imagine somebody coming to your home and say, "You're out."

They kick you out of your house and they take everything you've worked for away.

You have nothing but the clothes on your back.

When they first grabbed the father, forcefully took him out of the house, he's yelling to the children, "Don't leave the house, stay inside, stay inside," and the kids are hanging onto whatever furniture they could.

And then the communists grabbed them, just threw everybody out, just threw everybody out in the snow.

They went from place to place, basically abandoned homes.

There were already people starving, and so there were abandoned homes.

- In 1931, the government and the Communist Party is fixated on this drive to meet their industrialization goals and to take as much from the countryside as they can possibly get.

Agricultural production is plummeting where animals are dying, where farmers don't want to work, because they're not getting paid and they're beginning to starve.

The Soviet government and the Communist party send additional authorities into the countryside.

They want grain, they want potatoes, they want meat.

And if they find something, they take it.

- "Commissions of young Komsomol activists and local officials would go from house to house searching for grain.

They took away everything they found.

After everything had been taken, people began to starve.

The old men died first, because they gave away whatever food they had to their children, and their children in turn gave it to their own children."

- [Bohdan] If a certain farm does not meet the grain quota, then it is subject to additional fines of meat and potatoes.

In 1932, it was known by the Communist party leaders that farmers on the collective farms were so desperate, they were so hungry that they would be going into the fields and cutting down grain even before the grain was ripe.

Stalin basically writes this law, writes this decree that sentences the farmers to starvation, basically, because in a situation where the grain production is plummeting and the government is taking all of this food, all this agricultural produce, there's nothing left for the farmers.

If you’re caught stealing grain from the collective farm, you could be shot, or 10 years are given to you.

- [Zorianna] Internal passports were issued to stop villagers from leaving to look for work or food in the cities.

Many left anyways.

Borders were sealed to prevent hungry people from entering Russia for food.

- My family was living in a dugout at the time, because they were persona non grata, enemies of the people, because their father was in Siberia now.

He had been a Kulak, a farmer, and he didn't wanna join the collective farm.

So my grandmother, my mother's mother, would come to the children once a week with whatever she could have saved in terms of bread and she would only get like a small, like a handful of bread a day for herself.

But she would save and bring it home to the kids.

Of course, the infant, he starved to death first.

That was Savka.

He died when mother, grandmother was working.

So they hid his body.

They hid his body for a week till she came home to see the baby for the last time.

And they got a coffin made.

And when they brought the coffin, it was too small for his body.

And that scene haunted my mother till she died.

(person sings in Ukrainian) - [Zorianna] By spring 1933, 25,000 Ukrainians were starving to death each day.

- Even though the Soviets kept a tight control on the news coming out of Ukraine, enough leaked that the Ukrainian community knew that the conditions in Ukraine were bad.

The Ukrainian community believed in our Ukrainian culture, so they used their native choral music and dances as a form of outreach to educate the American audiences.

Before each performance, someone would give a short lecture about the crisis in Ukraine, but the cruelty of the Soviet Union and the suffering of the Ukrainian people was almost difficult to convey.

- There were many people, my grandmother would say, that were laying in the streets, starving, reaching their arm up, begging for food.

My mom sometimes said that she would see people that have already died.

- There were big line for bread.

Stand all night and wait, wait, wait, wait.

They bring bread to this magasin, this store and who were strong, they push, push- - Yeah, push and shove, survival of the fittest.

- They get bread- - Who could get to the front of the line.

- And the rest of the people do not get anything.

They wait all night long, standing there in (speaks Ukrainian), in line.

They did not get any.

- [Halyna] The Ukrainians across the United States made a final protest in the fall of 1933.

Marches in the cities became very violent when the American communists attacked the protestors.

In Minneapolis, 150 Ukrainians gathered in the St. Michael's parish basement to write a letter to President Roosevelt.

This letter condemned the Soviet crimes against the Ukrainian people.

However, their efforts were in vain, because President Roosevelt thought that the USSR could be a good ally against the rising Nazi Germany.

- [Zorianna] President Roosevelt invited Soviet foreign affairs Commissar, Maxim Litvinov to Washington in November, 1933 to establish diplomatic ties.

- I'm looking forward the great pleasure and honor of making the acquaintance of your illustrious President.

- [Commentator] The ensuing conference at the White House and with the State Department are expected to result in formal recognition of Russia within a few days.

- In 1933, Stalin didn't want foreign help coming into the country.

Stalin said there's no famine at all.

- [Zorianna] The Soviet regime used disinformation techniques to cover up the famine.

While millions of Ukrainian farmers laid dying, Western journalists like Walter Duranty of the New York Times and celebrities like George Bernard Shaw essentially served as Stalin's apologists to deny eyewitness accounts.

- The Soviets covered up the Holodomor for more than 50 years.

But two men in the Ukrainian community in the Twin Cities ensured that it would not be forgotten forever.

(gentle music) - [Zorianna] Dmytro Solovey's book, "Golgotha of Ukraine," was published in both Ukrainian and English language editions.

- [Halyna] Solovey and his family fled west during World War II and ended up in the displaced persons camps in Hanover, Germany, in the British Zone.

While he was in the camp, he used his time to record testimonies from survivors of the great famine of 1932-'33.

And when he arrived in St. Paul, then he compiled these testimonies in his book, "The Golgotha of Ukraine."

- One of the testimonies in the book is by Toma Riabokin.

He was a physics professor, rocket scientist.

He was desperately trying to save his family alive in villages.

So whenever it was possible, he brought food to them and so on.

- [Zorianna] In her book, "Red Famine," journalist Anne Applebaum reprinted the text of a letter from Toma Riabokin's niece Zina, which he received two weeks after her death.

- "We have neither bread nor anything else to eat.

Dad is completely exhausted from hunger and lies on the bench, unable to stand.

Mother is blind from hunger.

So I guide her when she has to go outside.

Please, uncle, take me to Kharkiv, because I too will die from hunger here.

Please take me, please.

I still am young and I want so much to live."

She was only 11 when she died.

- The newly arrived Ukrainians collected money and also collected copies of this book and sent the copies to public libraries and to elected officials in the state of Minnesota, so that the people would know about the Soviet genocide.

- The book was published in 1953.

That was actually the first publication about the famine that actually was released throughout the world, because the famine actually has done a tremendous, let's say, mental oppression on people.

People couldn't speak about it, it was so, so oppressive.

And this book like opened up their mouth.

(person sings in foreign language) - [Zorianna] But gradually, the voices bearing witness grew silent.

Survivor grief remained a private matter, until the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor, in 1983.

Soon after, another Minnesotan used the power of film to once again bring eyewitness stories to the world's attention.

- The film was "Harvest of Despair" by Slavko Nowytski.

He was interviewing survivors.

She really did not wish to speak.

She had never really spoken publicly about it, but she thought it was necessary for history to do that.

But that was really hard for her.

So I was there when they interviewed her.

Once she got going, she was okay for most of it.

But see, I don't know why I get all worked up about it, but because we'd never seen her really suffer or get emotional really about anything our whole lives, and this, we could see, it came from a very deep, very deep, painful place which we had never seen.

- [Zorianna] Maria Wowk did not use her real name in "Harvest of Despair."

Many survivors never spoke of their experiences at all, afraid of Soviet retaliation.

(person sings in Ukrainian) - [Zorianna] In 2022, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in a genocidal war of conquest.

But unlike Stalin's coverup, Russian propagandists today freely admit their intentions.

(person speaks Russian) (people speaking Russian) - [Zorianna] But this time, the Ukrainian people are not alone.

- Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.

- [Zorianna] Minnesota's Ukrainian community is united in support of Ukraine's fight for freedom and in welcoming war refugees.

- In 1933, our Ukrainians from Minnesota gathered here together to help fight genocide.

And right now we have same issues.

Our Ukrainian people here in Minneapolis, Minnesota trying to help them survive.

Here in this store, we are helping all those Ukrainians who are recently came from Ukraine.

- [Zorianna] In the St. Paul suburb of Oakdale, the Protez foundation provides rehab services for wounded Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

(Vitaliy speaks Ukrainian) (Oleh speaks Ukrainian) (Vitaliy speaks Ukrainian) (Oleh speaks Ukrainian) (Vitaliy speaks Ukrainian) (Oleh speaks Ukrainian) (Vitaliy speaks Ukrainian) (gentle music) - [Zorianna] To remember is important, but it is not enough.

Perpetrators of the genocide and war crimes must be brought to justice.

(person sings in Ukrainian)