Shoah
The Memory Keeper of Kyiv
I’ve read countless books on the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, both factual and fictionalised accounts, and we all know about the appalling acts by Nazi Germany that led to the extermination of millions of Jews and Romanys and others in the concentration camps, gas chambers and mass shootings, during World War II. So how come I hadn’t even heard of the Holomodor – death by hunger – in Ukraine? 
I have now, though, through the pages of a novel published in 2022: The Memory Keeper of Kyiv. And it will surely haunt me.
It’s the more powerful I suspect because of the images flashing onto our screens daily in the news, images of devastation in Ukraine as Russia attempts to subjugate this nation and destroy their culture. Vivid images of bodies left lying in the frozen ground, Ukrainian faces ravaged by despair, women lamenting their dead, the haunted eyes of orphaned children, snow falling over scenes of utter ruin, families ripped apart and displaced. All so redolent of the pictures author Erin Litteken describes in The Memory Keeper of Kyiv. Inhumanity and brutality on a scale it’s hard to comprehend or believe.
Litteken is the granddaughter of a Ukrainian refugee from World War II which instantly gives her credentials for telling this tale. The poignancy of the current conflict appalls her; the horror of terrible history repeating itself. Her novel is an attempt to imagine and recreate the 1930s when Stalin’s activists marched across the Soviet Union and created a man-made famine in Ukraine, exacting a toll of almost 4 million lives.
As one of her principal characters who lived through the atrocities said: Share my story, our story, with everyone, so what happened to us never happens again. If only. But she has gone some way to exposing this forgotten horror.
The tale is told in two time frames, the 1930s and the 2000s, and the alternating perspectives worked for me since I found the accounts of life through the Holodomor so harrowing it was a relief to move to the nearer present, even though that time too is wreathed in tragedy and sadness. The natural disasters are at least understandable and forgivable.
I’ll sketch the plot lightly so as not to spoil it for future readers of the book. But perhaps a warning is wise: there is only one attempt at the end to soften the blackness, and by then it seems rather contrived.
1929
Kateryna Viktorivna Shevchenko (Katya) is a boisterous feisty 16-year-old, newly in love with Pavlo, a boy she’s known all her life. When the peace of their rural life is shattered by the coming of Stalin’s activists in January 1930, everything changes. Arrests and deportations begin immediately, appropriation of properties starting with the wealthiest, religious icons replaced with the trappings of collectivisation and communism, rebels disappearing. Interventions are in vain and incur terrible penalties.
Agonising choices face those left behind. Stalin’s plan is to terrorise them into subservience, appropriating their produce and animals and possessions, brutalising people and property, so they will join his regime, and even when they do forcing them into starvation. Resistance and disobedience attract instant death or deportation. The threat of harsh punishments makes ordinarily peace-loving people do astonishing things, and there’s a particularly devastating sense of loss attached to locals who succumb to the blackmail, collaborate with the enemy, and betray their compatriot neighbours.
As the atrocities mount, Katya begins to record events on tiny scraps of paper, with the stub of an old pencil. Then, on the day before their wedding, tragedy comes to them personally: Pavlo and his parents are shot in cold blood, and her own father is deported by the invading activists. In the pervasive fear, even the opportunity to truly mourn their grievous loss has been taken from them.
Tragedy after tragedy follows, and no effort is made to sanitise or soften the horrors for the sake of finer sensibilities. Even when Katya acts to try to save her family, and performs deeds of immense heroism, she’s wracked by guilt for the consequences of her choices, a guilt which haunts her to her last breath.
2004
Newly widowed, Cassie, is clinging to the remnants of life before her husband was killed in a car accident, though the memories are increasingly stifling her, trapping her in the past. She’s merely going through the motions of a bare-bones existence. Her 5-year-old daughter, Birdie, hasn’t spoken in over fourteen months since the tragedy. But then they are persuaded by Cassie’s mum to move to her childhood home to help care for Cassie’s grandmother, Bobby, a Ukrainian widow who survived the Holodomor. The move forces her out of the spiral of sadness, and gradually Cassie sheds the hard outer shell of her grief. And despite her resistance, she even finds love again with their neighbour, Nick, grandson of another Ukrainian woman, Mina.
But Bobby is losing her grip on reality as dementia sets in. She reverts to old behaviours, burying food in strange places and wandering out of the house at night lamenting past deeds. Cassie and her mother are at a loss to understand why. Until that is, Cassie discovers Bobby’s journal and scraps of paper covered in spidery Cyrillic script tucked into odd places. In a lucid moment Bobbie gives her granddaughter permission to read this account of her experiences in the1930s; she simply cannot bring herself to talk about those appalling memories but they should be known. Nick speaks Ukrainian and he helps to translate the texts. It’s an account of Katya’s life. Pavlo had told her moments before his death: You must survive this and tell the people of the world what has happened here, so that it doesn’t happen again. Use your pencil and paper and weave your beautiful words to keep our memories alive. Don’t let me die in vain, Katya. She was true to her promise to him.
It’s a shocking account. But how sad that such courageous efforts were not enough to prevent history repeating the errors of the past for Ukraine. That we were not taught this evil alongside the Holocaust. That we did not know.
The philosophy of Katya’s father might well resonate for many in 2023 too: Just make it through today and hope that tomorrow will be better. But it ought not to be good enough for us who see what is happening. We surely can’t walk by on the other side. Not when we know.