More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics. JOSEPH STALIN
Ukraine is fertile and plentiful, and Stalin thinks we should be the breadbasket of the Soviet Union,”
“To achieve that, he wants us to give up our land and join collective farms.
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.”
everyone has things in their past that makes them sad, but you have to push through it.”
“Just make it through today, and hope tomorrow will be better.”
“What is a kulak, anyway? Anyone who disagrees with Stalin. Anyone who gets in the way of his big plan. They don’t like you, then you are a kulak, and they can do whatever they want with you!”
“There is no time limit on grief.
She could no longer call herself a farmer; she was only a cog in the wheel of the state.
Just make it through today and hope that tomorrow will be better.
“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.
“When he died, I thought I would die, too. That I could not live without him. But I could. And I did.
“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.”
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.”
“Life is a series of choices, each one pushing you towards the next. Maybe if I’d chosen
differently in the very beginning, things would have been better.” “Or maybe they would have been worse,” Cassie said. Bobby shrugged one bony shoulder. “Maybe. But what’s done is done, and I can’t change it now. I can only say this: I made a mistake in thinking I could bury it all. Looking to the future doesn’t mean you have to forget the past. You can have both, Cassie, and be all the richer for it.”
Be happy. Live your life.
Looking to the future doesn’t mean you have to forget the past. You can have both.
the Holodomor—or death by hunger—was devastatingly brutal and only one part of Joseph Stalin’s larger assault against the Ukrainian people.
In August 1932, Stalin issued a statewide decree known as “The Law of Five Stalks of Grain,” calling for ten years’ imprisonment or death for anyone caught taking any state-owned property—which, to be clear, was everything—even a handful of grain, rotten potatoes from a field, or fish from a stream.
Armed activists patrolled the countryside and sat in watchtowers, shooting, beating, and arresting men, woman, and children as they tried to avoid starvation by eating the very crops they’d sown or gathering food from the land they’d lived on their whole lives.
Stalin’s measures affected the entire region, but he targeted Ukraine with further brutal decrees in an attempt to subjugate the Ukrainian nationalism and cu...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
the losses, studies in 2018 estimate 3.9 million Ukrainians died in the Holodomor.

