"Portrait of a Ukrainian Woman"
(oil painting on canvas, 9X12, 2008)
"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you."
Aldous Huxley
"Memory feeds imagination."
Amy Tan
"History may be called, more generally still, the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to everyman."
Thomas Carlyle
I painted this portrait of a sad Ukrainian woman in the spring of 2008 as I was working on organizing a commemorative event dedicated to the victims of the Ukrainian famine/genocide of 1932-33. Perpetrated by the Soviet Regime to crush Ukrainian nationalism and the resistance of Ukrainian peasants towards collective farms, the man-made famine took the lives of millions of innocent men, women and children.
As I was working on the web site for the event I read countless survivor accounts and I just kept on crying. I read passages like the following: “People were dying all over our village. The dogs ate the ones that were not buried. If people could catch the dogs they were eaten. In the neighboring village people ate bodies that they dug up.”
There were many other accounts and as I read them I kept on thinking how lucky I was to live in this time, because I don’t think I would’ve survived in Ukraine of the 1930’s. My maternal grandfather’s family survived the famine because his mother’s friend worked at a glue factory and was able to steal glue, which they then made into soup. My other grandfather used to recollect how ‘normal’ it was to see people drop dead from hunger right on the streets. In a little over a year up to 10 million people died… The Ukrainian man-made famine is a short chapter in Ukrainian history and just a page in the history of humanity, and yet I hope that it would never be forgotten.
