“Remembrance is a form of responsibility”

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The travelling exhibition “Why are you still alive?”, presented by the Mykola Haievoi Centre, is currently on display at the Fürstenberghaus at the University of Münster. It deals with the Holodomor of 1932–33, the greatest famine in European history. The Holodomor (Ukrainian for “famine-murder”) was caused by the forced collectivisation of farms under Joseph Stalin’s rule in 1930, the subsequent brutal requisitioning of grain and, ultimately, the confiscation of all food supplies. Around four million people in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, the former ‘breadbasket of Europe’, starved to death. At the same time, around two million people in other parts of the Soviet Union, particularly in Kazakhstan and southern Russia, died of starvation.

In Münster, it was the speaker André Sahorn who particularly impressed the approximately 100 visitors during the opening. Born in 1973 in the Münsterland region, where he still lives, Sahorn is the son of a Ukrainian from the village of Burkiwzi, 160 kilometres south of the capital Kyiv. His father – whose name was originally longer, namely Zahorodnyuk – had survived the Holodomor as a six-year-old boy. His parents and his little sister starved to death. After the Wehrmacht invaded, he was deported to the Münsterland region as a young forced labourer.

In 1945, he decided not to return to Ukraine, even though Moscow’s security forces were also searching for Soviet citizens who had remained behind in western Germany, who were then often sentenced to prison camps for “contact with the enemy”. The young man narrowly escaped the searchers.

Seventy years after his father’s deportation, André Sahorn visited his father’s home village for the first time and was warmly welcomed. He soon heard some harrowing stories. One of them was about two brothers who were very popular and helpful in the village, and who were as close as two peas in a pod. One died in the famine; the other survived. Sahorn recounts: “The people in the village suspect that they had agreed: if one of them died, the other would eat him so that he himself would not starve to death.” Numerous official documents and accounts from Holodomor survivors in Ukraine do indeed attest to cases of cannibalism, which sometimes even took place within a single family.

Ricarda Vulpius, Professor of Eastern European History at Münster, began by providing a historical introduction to the topic. The exhibition on the Holodomor, which many historians and the parliaments of several countries have described as genocide, is “an important act of enlightenment and more than that: remembrance is a form of responsibility.” Mariya Sharko from the Office for the Universal Church and Global Cooperation in the Catholic Diocese of Münster spoke about contemporary practices of commemorating the Holodomor. The local “Westfälische Nachrichten” reported on the opening.

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (UINP) and the Holodomor Museum, both in Kyiv, and is organised in Germany by historian Gerhard Gnauck from the MHZ. It can be viewed in Münster until 12 May inclusive. It will then move to Potsdam. The opening is on 20 May at 6 pm with a discussion on the topic “The Holodomor in German memory”, featuring, among others, Slavicist Prof. Alexander Wöll and historian Dr Franziska Davies (Campus Am Neuen Palais, Building 12, Lecture hall 0.39). The exhibition will also feature substitute foods such as those prepared by people in Ukraine in 1933 in order to survive. The exhibition will be on display in Potsdam until 2 July.