A very short (40 pages) collection of eyewitness accounts from the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1933. Oleksa Voropai was an agronomist in the Ukraine and thus in a special position to view the incredible suffering of the people there.

I don't know much about the Holodomor yet, but to hear Voropai tell it, this was an entirely man-made famine: there was no bad harvest, no crop failure. The Ukrainians reaped the usual amount of grain and then Soviet officials confiscated every last kernel, leaving the people to starve, because they were "enemies of Communism." A deliberate act of genocide. (Some other historians, I know, theorize that the famine was more the result of incompetence and corruption rather than actual malice. Of course, these theories are not mutually exclusive, and in any case the end result was the same.)

What's described in this book is horrifying, even by my standards. Entire villages depopulated by starvation. Mothers eating their own children. And for the first time I thought I understood why the Ukrainians were so nationalistic and brutal during World War II. In many Holocaust books you'll read that the Ukrainians had a reputation for being particularly vicious, worse than the Nazis themselves even, and finally I realize why: they were understandably bitter over what they had suffered in the famine, when in the name of the international proletariat the Soviet Union took everything they had. And so the people took out their anger on the Jews, whom they equated with the Communists. It disturbed me, the fact that I suddenly understood this. I didn't WANT to understand it.

I have just started my research of the Holodomor and I think this was a good book to begin with. Not for the faint of heart. ( )