April 14, 2017

“Bitter Harvest,” a Ukrainian tragedy

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Dear Editor:

A 5-year-old puts his ear to the ground on his mother’s grave without shedding a tear. He is probably showing his strength to his two younger sisters, hardly able to walk, as their father buries her. There is no one to help, as the villagers are starving to death.

This heartbreaking scene from “Bitter Harvest” has kept me awake, as my own family experienced similar horrors in 1932-1933 in Ukraine. I am just starting to recover from the recent death of my dearest grandmother Hanna, who passed away and joined her brother, Fedir. They survived the Holodomor in Poltava Oblast, while their youngest sister, Natalka, perished.

I wish my grandmother was still alive. If only we could have a conversation about the house where she was born and the bread they used to bake in the outdoor oven on summer days. I won’t be able to ask her more about her life as a miner in Donetsk and the romantic twist that brought her to Drohobych, where I was born.

George Mendeluk’s genius brings the memories of my grandmother’s family to life. Ten million innocent Ukrainians were taken away in 1932-1933, yet another example of Russian and Soviet genocidal policies in Ukraine. Mr. Mendeluk also depicts the flagrant attack on Ukrainian Christian values. Many of us forget how “underground” the Church was under the Soviets. Moreover, every Soviet officer who physically abuses the priests in the movie is a Russian speaker. Thus, over 130 official bans of the Ukrainian language in the Russian empire emerge before my eyes.

The Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin defined genocide; the United Nations incorporated it into the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Every line in “Bitter Harvest” speaks to this universal law.

The period before and during 1932-1933 was what Jerzy Giedroyc called the “Executed Renaissance” (“Rozstrilyane Vidrodzhennia”) – the extermination of the literary and cultural flowering of the 1920s-1930s. Mr. Mendeluk introduces the image of the protagonist’s best friend, Mykola, which directly mirrors the life of writer Mykola Khvyliovy, who committed suicide in the spring of 1933 in protest against mass arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Stalin exterminated tens of thousands of young, genuinely talented people like Mykola.

The movie’s scenes of violence by the Bolsheviks show killings conducted in a deliberate, targeted manner. Thousands of Ukrainian farmers revolted against collectivization and attacks on their private property and civil rights. As many as 5,000 protests took place all over Ukraine in 1932-1933 to voice discontent with this selective and unjust deprivation of the means to life.

Lest we forget, the genocide continues. Over 1.5 million people are internally displaced in the current Russian war against Ukraine in the Donbas. Russia is intentionally exterminating and harming the future prospects of tens of thousands of Ukraine’s most resilient men, women and children.

And yet, “Bitter Harvest” instills hope and the fervent belief that Ukrainians can contribute more unique thinkers and hard-working people of good will to this world.

Ottawa

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