The European Parliament passed a resolution that declared Holodomor — the starvation of millions of people in Ukraine in the 1930s under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin — a "genocide".
There's fascinating primary source documents, called yitzkor books. People wrote these as memorials to their villages (very often in Ukraine), giving personal and community histories, often including the holocaust and it's aftermath. Some are boring. Some are harrowing. A lot are not translated to English, but some are. I love reading these. I've found some wild and illuminating tales, and at least what I've encountered has been universally pro soviet.
Here's a good source: https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/
They're great. There's no external ideological filter or censor making you wonder what's missing. The most interesting narratives are from absolutely marginalized people, so these have no presence at all in the capitalist narratives that are about what happened to these people.
There's a realky compelling one, which I can't find anymore, about a Jewish man living in a barn with other Jews that were given as slaves to a farmer (I think in Ukraine). He watched his son get shot and killed for stealing clothes and get left on a pile of corpses in front of the barn. One day a Soviet plane flew over, so he knew their liberation was imminent.
The farmer, hoping for leniency, at the last moment begged him to tell the Soviets that he hadn't been too cruel.
There's fascinating primary source documents, called yitzkor books. People wrote these as memorials to their villages (very often in Ukraine), giving personal and community histories, often including the holocaust and it's aftermath. Some are boring. Some are harrowing. A lot are not translated to English, but some are. I love reading these. I've found some wild and illuminating tales, and at least what I've encountered has been universally pro soviet.
Here's a good source: https://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/
Thank you for sharing, I will definitely check that out.
They're great. There's no external ideological filter or censor making you wonder what's missing. The most interesting narratives are from absolutely marginalized people, so these have no presence at all in the capitalist narratives that are about what happened to these people.
There's a realky compelling one, which I can't find anymore, about a Jewish man living in a barn with other Jews that were given as slaves to a farmer (I think in Ukraine). He watched his son get shot and killed for stealing clothes and get left on a pile of corpses in front of the barn. One day a Soviet plane flew over, so he knew their liberation was imminent.
The farmer, hoping for leniency, at the last moment begged him to tell the Soviets that he hadn't been too cruel.