Travelling Exhibition on Holodomor in Ukraine launched in Munich

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Despite Bavaria’s local election campaign, and many students being in the spring break, some 80 visitors attended the opening of the exhibition „How come you are still alive?”. Soviet state officials had addressed hungry farmers in Ukraine with this question under Joseph Stalin’s rule. Yet it was the state itself whose ruthless policy, starting with the collectivization of farms in 1930, caused the death by starvation of around 4 million Ukrainians. The subtitle of the exhibition tells more: “The Holodomor of 1932/33: Stalin plunges Ukraine into the greatest famine in European history.” It was a man-made, “political famine”, as historian Andrea Graziosi called it. At the same time, some two million people starved to death in other parts of the Soviet Union, especially in Kazakhstan and Southern Russia.

Nevertheless, the Holodomor (Ukrainian for “killing by hunger”) remains a part of history unknown to many Europeans. Until today, not a single German author has published a monograph or even a dissertation on it. Intensive research had started in the USA and Canada in the 1980s and in independent Ukraine in the 1990s. Meanwhile, in the majority of EU member states, legislatures (including the German Bundestag) have passed resolutions recognizing the Holodomor as a genocide. The significance of this piece of memory is confirmed by the fact that Russian authorities in Ukraine’s occupied territories are destroying memorial sites to the victims of the famine and of communist terror in general.

At the opening, professor Martin Schulze Wessel, MHC co-director, called Holodomor "the greatest of the Soviet mass crimes”, with its victims killed outnumbering those of the entire Gulag camp system. "Stalin wanted to erase the Ukrainians as a nation." The historian, along with Ukrainian co-director professor Yaroslav Hrytsak from UCU, edited a Holodomor volume in 2024: "Hunger als Waffe", in public access here.

During the opening, Volodymyr Tylishchak, Holodomor researcher at the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP) in Kyiv, author/editor of two books on Ukraine’s 1930s, described the widespread active and passive resistance to the Soviet authorities’ actions in this period. Millions of people, Tylishchak said, had thus "preserved their human dignity, against all odds". Among the guests were the Munich consuls general of Ukraine and Poland, Yuri Nykytiuk and Rafał Wolski, and Dr. Lilia Bondarenko, a representative of the Ukrainian Free University, based in Munich since 1950.

The Bavarian bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, “moderator” (head) of the World Council of Churches central committee, and the Ukrainian greek-catholic exarch for Germany, bishop Bohdan Dzyurakh, sent their greetings to the audience from afar.

The exhibition is presented in cooperation with the UINP and the Holodomor Museum, both in Kyiv, and organized in Germany by MHC researcher Dr. Gerhard Gnauck. It is displayed in Munich University’s main building, 1st floor, near the memorial dedicated to Hans and Sophie Scholl and other activists killed for their anti-Nazi resistance, and the “Speerträger” statue. After April 10th, 2026, it will start travelling to Münster, Potsdam, Cologne, and other towns.