Earth Remembers

Earth Remembers

A Holodomor Tale

In 1928, Katia Kovalenko believes the world is made of ordinary certainties: a khata ‘meant to hold’, bread cooling on a board, the warmth of the pich, and her three-year-old sister Dasha crowning their cow, Zirka, with cornflowers as if the season would last forever. Her father, Mykhailo, still trusts the old measures of a life—work, neighbours, faith, and land. But a new language seeps in: committees, quotas, ‘progress’, and the word voluntary repeated until it sounds like a threat. Officials begin ‘surveying holdings’, and the Kovalenkos learn how quickly a home can be turned into numbers. Questions about grain are not questions at all; they are hands reaching into your chest. A neighbour from the village, Mykola Kharchenko, learns to thrive inside the split between public slogans and private truth, rewarding performance and punishing doubt. As seasons turn, the village is remade into a system—lists, blacklists, inspections, queues, and rations—where people are assessed as ‘able-bodied’ or ‘expendable’, and survival is managed like a production target. Hunger becomes more than an empty stomach: it becomes paperwork, whispered fear, neighbour against neighbour, and laws that can make a few ears of grain a sentence. Even the children are reshaped: Russian is declared the language of ‘progress’, Ukrainian is treated like a dirty rag, and a Wall of Shame writes fear in chalk. Still, they cling to what the state insists is meaningless: a family name, a loaf divided honestly, a song remembered when singing is dangerous. Katia writes because writing is one thing the state cannot truly own. Her diary becomes contraband and archive—proof of the difference between what they say and what is done. Later, in rooms pressed tight with fear and city noise, she learns that a witness can be a tool as sharp as any decree: a whispered poem, a ‘bridge’ offered at significant risk, a typewriter sought in secret, and notebooks hidden in walls, waiting. Earth Remembers is a Holodomor tale of what power tries to erase—and what refuses to vanish. The black soil keeps its own record, even when a regime tries to edit the past into silence. It asks what survives: language, love, and the courage to remember.

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