History and Hope

Holocaust Memorial, Kiev.

I was in Kiev over the weekend for a meeting of over-50 year old PCVs. It was great to be with close friends. We had our SNAC (Senior Network Action Committee) meeting at Peace Corps headquarters. We learned that the newest PCT Group 38, now in training in Chernigov, has many more seniors, many more over-70, than our group and previous groups did. Lillian Carter would be pleased! So are we.

After the meeting we had a grand tour of Kiev given by Dr. Valeriy Gontarenko (Dr. V), who grew up in Kiev and shared the glories and stories of his historic Podil neighborhood, one of the oldest in Kiev. We went to other sites, through a craftsmen and artisans neighborhood, to Parliament, the President's House, and majestic government buildings near bustling Chrishatik Street, the heart of the city, and to see St. Cyril's Church Museum, adorned with beautiful paintings.

We also went to the Holocaust memorial (above right) in Babi Yar, the large ravine outside of Kiev where over 33,000 Jews were rounded up and killed in cold blood on September 29-30, 1933, perhaps the largest two-day massacre of the Holocaust. Dr. Sasha Gonta met us there to share more information about this tragic event, one which the Soviet government didn't acknowledge and is only relatively recently being uncovered and discussed publicly. The Holocaust tragedy is also told in the documentary Babi Yar, by Anatoly Kuznetsov, based on the chilling and horrific experience of a survivor who played dead on top of thousands of corpses of loved ones and friends, artist Dina Pronicheva.

I cannot imagine the horror. I cannot imagine surviving. We walked the grounds aware that we were treading on a huge cemetary with thousands and thousands of unmarked graves, the voices of the massacred silenced, but not forgotten.

We also remembered another atrocity, the Holodomor, the starvation of 8-10 million Ukrainians in 1932-33 who, by order of Stalin, were forced at gun point, torture and threat of death or exile to Siberia, to give up their grain, all of it, their grinding wheels, their food. Controversy surrounds the details of this tragedy, and some deny it, but modern scholars have placed it in the context of Ukrainian resistance to Stalin's forced collectivization of their farms.

Our PCV friend Ilse, whose mother was born in Ukraine and fled with her husband to America in the1940s (Ilse's not sure how but with the help of friends), says her mother told many stories about this famine and her own tragic loss of several family members. It was good to have Ilse and her husband Carl with Jud and me on this visit.

It was president Yushchenko who had the Holodomor Park Memorial built to the victims in 2007-8 (photos right, the former president with his daughter). It includes a modern obelisk, along with the bronze statue of a starving young girl and a circle of grinding wheels. Very moving. It is set in a beautiful park near the Kiev Pediersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, the oldest orthodox Christian monastery, started in 1015. The old and the new. Good and evil. Sacred history and holocaust history.

The Holodomor is one of the newest memorials in the capital city of Kiev, and it is filling the need to remember. Thousands of daily visitors and hundreds of flowers and lighted candles placed at the site attest to its power to move us. Yushchenko, I think, was right about this.

But president Yushchenko's obsession with historical truth and remembrance became unpopular, and he was accused, for example, of favoring history over solving present-day problems. Still, Ilse thinks he will go down in history as a good president. I agree. Not soon, not now, but in time.

He will be, perhaps, the Ukrainian equivalent of Turkey's Ataturk, who instituted a republic on the foundation of preserving the past. Istanbul is now a tourist attraction for millions of visitors from all over the world because of it. It can happen here.

The generation that witnessed the Holocaust and Holodomor is fast disappearing, so first-hand accounts of these tragic stories will be lost if they are not told, collected and preserved now, and if we do not have ways to remember them. We need to be the voices of the dead, a community of memory.

We need our memorials not only to celebrate our heroes and heroines, but also to remember the dark moments in our history, to remember the losses, the killing of the spirit. Scholars remind us time and again that if we don't remember our history, we are doomed to repeat it.

Uncovering the secrets and lies of the past is difficult, but it can be a positive first step toward the future. It can be part and parcel of plans for social action, economic development, and social change, in Ukraine as elsewhere. In time, all these goals will converge.

Istanbul is a great contemporary example of such convergence. Ukraine will one day use its history to illuminate a vibrant present. It will become, like Istanbul, a destination for honoring the past and looking with hope toward the future. History and hope. In time, Ukraine, in time.

Going to Severodonestsk

I had to go to Severodonestk last week to sign off on a new bank account for the Peace Corps grant to Victoria for its “Know Your Rights” project. Not surprisingly, the Peace Corps-approved ProCredit bank does not have a branch in Starobilsk.

Severodonestk is a medium-sized industrial town about 60 miles from Starobilsk. It is not very attractive, with lots of Soviet-style buildings and belching chemical factories. Maybe I just didn't see the nicer parts of the city. Or perhaps it's that Spring hasn't arrived there yet. The town square is pretty, however, with a majestic cultural center, and the town features a huge bazaar covering several blocks between the center of town and the bus station. A pleasant walk. Dozens of plastic flower vendors added color to the scene, an irresistable lure for me, and I bought some pure white calla lilies as an Easter present for Luba.

But it took two hours to get there, on a crowded bus without shock absorbers on one of the worst roads in Ukraine I think. We bumped along at 30 miles per hour, hitting every pot hole. They were hard to avoid. The ride was jarring and jolting. People and packages went flying. We were on top of one another.

The bus ride back to Starobilsk was even worse. Travelers outnumbered buses, and people outnumbered seats. Instead of lines, there were crowds of people pushing and shoving, including babushkas with huge packages and bags plopped everywhere. One large woman shoved me aside and put her gigantic bags at my feet to block me even further. It was a different woman than the one who shoved in front of me at the cashier's counter when I bought my ticket. These shoving babuskas kept multiplying. Where were the sweet kerchieved-babuskas when you needed them?

My lilies stuck out from my shoulder bag, looking very pretty and perky I thought. But the pushing and shoving to get on the bus knocked off the white flowers so I ended up with long green plastic stems looking as forloin as I was feeling. Some passengers were kind enough to pick the callas off the ground and give them to me, not as pure white as they had been, but I managed to salvage a few. I was pushed onto the bus by three or four people and ended up, discheveled and disjointed, at a window seat.

On top of all this Ukrainian surrrealism, the jet lag from my trip home sent me drifting. I couldn't keep my eyes open, even with the shoving and pushing. More people threw themselves onto the overcrowded bus as I unwillingly slipped in and out of sleep. My tiredness took over. I awoke at one point to find a big bag on my lap. There was no room for it any place else. Such are the perils of a PCV in a far-away village in Ukraine.

By the time we got back to Starobilsk I wondered about the joys of travel. But it's not just here, I reminded myself; bad roads and obnoxious people are everywhere. I added another notch to my Peace Corps adventure belt, and saw the Calla lilies smiling at me.