This month’s highlight is a letter written by Stepan Vovk who recalls surviving the Holodomor as an 18-year-old in the Village of Tarnava in Monastyryshche raion, Cherkasy oblast (Vinnytsia oblast at the time).
His account is dedicated to the cruelty of the perpetrators, search brigade activists who were enriching themselves instead of surrendering the spoils of their searches to the state, and the tragic fate of their innocent victims.
The letter is found in HREC’s Maniak Collection, which contains valuable witness accounts gathered in the late 1980s by journalist Volodymyr Maniak. Maniak received thousands of accounts from survivors of the Holodomor after he published appeals for memoirs in Ukrainian newspapers. The HREC online collection contains scans of the original letters and accounts, including Holodomor memoirs from villages, towns, and cities affected by the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. A selection of the accounts have also been translated into English.
