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Title: Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust
ISBN: 0393304167
Author:
Miron Dolot
Publicate Date: 1987-06
Publish: 1987-06
List Price: $16.95
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $9.24
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $6.07
Amazon Merchant Price: $11.53
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| Customer Review: |
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1: The Hidden Holocaust
I dare anyone to read this book and not be shocked, horrified, angry, saddened, or effected by any other of a host of lesser emotions. Socialism is evil, regardless of its intent, or who may be leading. I hope the victims of communism's senseless policies have some extra blessing in a later life, and may Stalin and his ilk rot forever in hell.
Tim
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2: A Firsthand Experience of the Soviet-Induced Ukrainian Famine-Genocide
This review is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of this tragedy. Miron Dolot is the pseudonym of a Ukrainian who went through the 1932-1933 famine, later fought in WWII and was a prisoner of the Germans, and who finally emigrated to the west after the war.
Strictly speaking, the Ukrainian farmer should not be called a peasant, because he was not a farmhand, nor a serf: "...the Ukrainian SELIANYN was a free Cossack-farmer before the Russian occupation of Ukraine." (p. xiv). Contrary to Communist propaganda, the kurkul/kulak was not usually particularly wealthy, and his success did not come from exploiting the poor. It came from initiative and hard work.
Far from being an incidental by-product of collectivization, the mass starvation of Ukrainians was very deliberate. In fact, so scrupulous were the Soviets in confiscating the last traces of feedstuffs hidden by Ukrainian farmers that they checked everything imaginable. (pp. 166-167). They overturned the cribs of babies (p. 167), tore apart the chimneys and ovens, holed the walls and floors (p. 208), destroyed the fields and gardens (p. 229), and sent horses walking all over the fields in the belief that a horse would abruptly stop at, or jump over, a buried food-storage pit. (p. 167). Dolot survived this genocide because his family had very creative hiding places for feedstuffs. (pp. 170-171).
The people ate almost anything: rotting food, dogs and cats, wildlife, frogs, weeds, tree bark, insects, etc. Cannibalism existed, and mothers cooked the bodies of their own children. (p. 199).
Suicides were quite common. Corpses lined the roads in winter. Cemeteries were overflowing, with people too weak to bury their dead. Beggars were everywhere. People bartered their last valuables, and even robbed the graves for jewelry. (p. 178).(This is reminiscent of the later poverty-stricken WWII-era Poles who dug up the sites of mass murders of Jews.) In time, villages became silent ghost towns.
Dolot refutes those who suppose that the targeting of the Ukrainians was incidental: "It finally became clear to us that there was a conspiracy against us; that somebody wanted to annihilate us, not only as farmers but as a people--as Ukrainians." (p. 175).
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3: Animal Farm Companion
I read this book about twenty years ago, and the images never left me. I started using this book in my classroom when I taught Animal Farm about ten years ago. My students are always shocked that these events took place and how the people survived or didn't survive such austere conditions. The book is easy to read and understand.
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4: First Hand Account
Excellent first hand account of the attempts of collectivization under Stalin; attempts that met with little or no success. I earned and received a Bachelor of Arts in History and this subject was never covered as well as it should have been. The "less hidden" Holocaust always seems to take center stage in this society. I became interested in the subject due to the flight of my paternal grandparents from the affected area prior to the full onslaught being felt.
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5: A Personal Account of a Nationwide Murder
This book is a record of what some daily life was like in the Ukrainian villages during the Great Famine.
It is his memoirs, so it cant really be judged for facts and such, but it seems very intresting to read, and accurate.
The numbers couldt be a tiny bit too high, but it might actually have been that, but we will never know due to the destruction of any documents concerning mass death in The Famine.
I say its a good book, but would only recommend it too people intrested in Russian History specifically, because its such a specific and narrow read on a subject, from a first hand account, which usually dont know everything. There are better academic books out there documenting the famine well, but this is nontheless a good read and history.
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