The Memory Keeper of Kyiv (105)

She unfolded the thin piece of paper.

Dear Cassie,

Please forgive this intrusion, but I recently read your book about the Holodomor. Your story was very familiar to me, but when I read your author’s note, I knew I had to write. You see, I used to know a Kateryna Viktorivna Bilyk in another life, but we were separated in the war, and I thought her dead. I thought everyone from my family was dead. But it seems I may have been wrong. Please call me at the number below when you can.

Sincerely,

Halyna Mykolayovych Bilyk





Cassie pulled out a tissue and dabbed at her eyes. “You didn’t fail, Bobby. She lived. Halya lived. You kept her alive, and your story helped her finally find us. I called her right away, and she’s flying out next week to meet everyone. She wants to come here to see you, too. All of you.”

A wave of emotion hit, so strong it nearly knocked Cassie over, and she gripped the headstone, grounding herself against the cool granite.

“Mommy! Look!” Birdie cried. A gust of wind swirled through the cemetery, and the crabapple tree released a flurry of petals in a shower of pink snow around the little girl.

Arms outstretched, Birdie spun in a circle, giggling as they fell around her. “Look! They’re happy, Mommy! Bobby and Alina are happy!”





AUTHOR’S NOTE





I hope you enjoyed The Memory Keeper of Kyiv. This story is very important to me.

Cassie’s Bobby is, in many ways, my Bobby. My Ukrainian great–grandmother was a strong woman who survived Polish, Soviet, and German occupations, never wasted food, loved her flower beds, and, until my mom intervened, really did think she should give money to any type of police officer or state trooper fundraising telemarketer to avoid them coming to arrest her in the night. She also, at the behest of her dying sister, married her widowed brother–in–law to raise their child. Whether it was a love story or not has been lost to history; it was something she never talked about.

My journey into Ukraine’s history began with the intent to understand the stories she told me when I was a girl—how she, my great–grandfather, and their three children fled their western Ukrainian village during World War II—but the more I found out about the Holodomor, the more I knew this novel had to come first and that their history would inspire my second novel. My great uncle was both instrumental and endlessly patient in helping me with Ukrainian cultural and language details. He, along with my and my mother’s memories of my grandfather and great-grandmother, helped bring the Ukrainian heritage aspect of Cassie’s story to life. I am eternally grateful to them, and any errors that occur are mine.

My great–grandparents may have borne witness to Holodomor survivors’ testimonies, but this isn’t my family’s story—thankfully they didn’t suffer that horror. Inspired by the snippets of tales my great–grandmother passed on, I did extensive research into written and oral interviews of survivors, scholarly journals, books, and museums. While artistic license is always a factor in a work of fiction—such as placing Pavlo’s rebellion in 1931 instead of 1930, when most rebellions occurred, or using Slava Ukrayini as a toast instead of a greeting—the facts of this atrocity were horrific enough without me having to embellish them. I wish I could say the historical details surrounding this novel were exaggerated, but the truth is, the Holodomor—or death by hunger—was devastatingly brutal and only one part of Joseph Stalin’s larger assault against the Ukrainian people.

Between 1932 and 1933, one in every eight Ukrainians died in this manmade famine. And it was absolutely manmade. During this time, the USSR exported tons of apples and tomato paste, barrels of pickles, honey, milk, and almost two million tons of grain in 1932 alone. Stores of crops, rotting sometimes as they awaited exportation, sat at railway stations and on the sides of roads under guard while the people starved within sight of them. Grain procurement quotas were kept unreasonably high, even though the spring seed grain had already been seized and the farmers of Ukraine had nothing left to give.

Across the Soviet Union, food shortages resulting from the chaos of collectivization and dekulakization, and Stalin’s refusal to lower grain quotas in the wake of these issues, led to an estimated 8.7 million deaths. This included people in Soviet Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and certain provinces of Russia. In August 1932, Stalin issued a statewide decree known as “The Law of Five Stalks of Grain,” calling for ten years’ imprisonment or death for anyone caught taking any state-owned property—which, to be clear, was everything—even a handful of grain, rotten potatoes from a field, or fish from a stream. Armed activists patrolled the countryside and sat in watchtowers, shooting, beating, and arresting men, woman, and children as they tried to avoid starvation by eating the very crops they’d sown or gathering food from the land they’d lived on their whole lives.

Stalin’s measures affected the entire region, but he targeted Ukraine with further brutal decrees in an attempt to subjugate the Ukrainian nationalism and culture he saw as a threat to Soviet ideology. Guards closed Ukraine’s borders and a new internal passport system effectively prohibited travel between villages and cities, locking Ukraine into one giant death camp. The state began ”blacklisting” communities that didn’t meet their grain quotas, leading to punishments such as the banning of trading or receiving any food or manufactured goods—including kerosene, salt, and matches—and new higher food requisition quotas. To fill these quotas, activists visited homes and ripped apart ovens and walls, then plunged metal rods into hay, yards, and bedding to find every last bit of hidden food and remove it from the already starving peasants. All of this followed an ongoing assault on cherished Ukrainian cultural traditions—holidays and events such as Christmas, Easter, weddings, and Sunday services were banned, churches were desecrated and their bells melted down for their metal, and priests were arrested and deported en masse.