More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Cassie was failing on many levels of parenting, but no one could say she didn’t feed Birdie well.
Birdie hadn’t talked in fourteen months, one week, and three days. No reason why today should be any different.
Her mom usually kept this beast-mode side of her personality wrapped under a layer of not-so-subtle suggestions and passive-aggressive jabs.
Her emotions these days vacillated between apathy and anger and left no room for anything else.
You may as well get along. You’ll be sisters forever. It had become a joke between them, uttered whenever one irritated the other, and never failed to reduce the tension.
Playing out this old tradition was only a fun part of the wedding festivities, and the crowd laughed and cheered along with the entertainment.
Ukraine is fertile and plentiful, and Stalin thinks we should be the breadbasket of the Soviet Union,”
She didn’t want to walk through the house again, anyway. Nothing remained inside but sadness.
The past is done, Cassie. We must look to the future. It wasn’t very useful advice for a budding historian.
Everyone wants Ukraine’s fertile soil for their own, and nobody wants to let Ukrainians rule it.”
“Stalin has decided that Ukraine must be class-free in order for these collective farms to succeed.” Tato spoke in a low voice.
“Does she still not talk?” Bobby shot a glance toward Birdie, who’d skipped ahead after Anna. Cassie’s face tensed. “Not since the accident.” Bobby nodded. “Everyone grieves differently.”
Bobby turned to face Cassie and closed her eyes, as if retreating into herself. Her voice broke as she translated the words into English. “Just make it through today, and hope tomorrow will be better.”
Vasyl read prayers over their bodies, then helped them carry out the coffins. They stopped and tapped the end of each coffin on the doorjamb three times to allow the deceased to part with their home, then made their way to the cemetery.
“You must survive this and tell the people of the world what has happened here, so it doesn’t happen again. Use your pencil and paper and weave your beautiful words to keep our memories alive. Don’t let me die in vain, Katya.”
That’s what being a mother was—ripping out a piece of your heart and giving it to your child.
You have no idea what it’s like to be a woman. Men think they can take whatever they want, whenever they want from us. We never have a choice in that.”
“This is not about getting us to produce more food,” he said, as the impossibility of survival suddenly became so painfully clear to both of them. “They want us all dead.”
The food remained locked away, untouched and unattainable for so many, like the grain bins and potatoes they had seen on the way to town. There was no question now that there was food available to eat. The state had just decided the villagers weren’t worthy of eating it.
“Ukraine, 1930s”. The first entries shocked her. Holodomor, death by hunger, terror-famine, Stalin, death toll estimates from 4–10 million.
“Well, the famine was covered up pretty much until the Soviet Union fell, and there are still people who insist it never happened,”
Walter Duranty, from the New York Times, completely refuted that a famine was happening. Hell, he won a Pulitzer for his articles on it. Nobody wanted to believe the ‘breadbasket of Europe’ was being starved to death.”
Kolya flushed out field mice burrows with water to steal their tiny stashes of stored grains. Katya ground the kernels up with oak tree bark, combined the mixture with water, and made pancakes.
“The train let us off in the middle of a snowy wasteland. No shelter. They pulled the dead bodies off the cars and tossed them to the side of the tracks. They didn’t let us bury them, or even say a prayer for
Grief had pulled her so low that she’d never fully climbed back up from its depths. Now, melancholy was her constant companion, and it left little room for other emotions.
“What made you decide to plant sunflowers? I thought they made you sad?” “I decided it was time I stopped disliking them for the bad memories and choose to enjoy them for the good memories. It’s something I’m still working on.”
Katya cuddled herself around the two frail babies. If she couldn’t give either of them food, she would give to them all the love that she had. That much she could do, even though, deep down, she knew it wouldn’t be enough.
Being lucky had taken on much lower standards of late.
don’t just want you to know my story, Cassie. I want you to write it for me. Share my story, our story, with everyone, so what happened to us never happens again.”
“We traveled through Poland and ended up in the Allied occupied zone of Germany when the war ended. After that, we spent a few years in the Displaced Persons camps. We kept looking for her, just in case, but there were so many refugees. Millions of displaced people with no home, no country, no family. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
I wish I could say the historical details surrounding this novel were exaggerated, but the truth is, the Holodomor—or death by hunger—was devastatingly brutal and only one part of Joseph Stalin’s larger assault against the Ukrainian people. Between 1932 and 1933, one in every eight Ukrainians died in this manmade famine.
Any Ukrainians who dared to speak out were arrested, and the realities of the famine were left to be carried on in oral histories and hidden away in journals buried in walls or yards.
