On 2/1/08, Nancy Sturm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Our son recently marrried a beautiful young woman from the Ukraine. He > visited to meet her family and ask for her hand. The pictures were amazing. > Her family are rather prosperous dairy farmers. Her brother is in > veterinary school. Their farm seemed very rustic to us, and there' > certainly nothing very fancy here. >
How well you lived depended greatly on your affiliation to the communist party. Many Russians moved into the Ukraine and took over the big farms. They were taken from the Ukrainians that survived the mass starvation inflicted by the Russians in 1932-33. This genocide resutled in the deaths of 7 million Ukrainians, that is more than two times as many people that died in the Holocust. They came and took all the crops in an effort to quiet the masses. I went with my to the Ukraine with my parents in '94 after the break up of the soviet union. It was the first time they could safely go back. Some of thier friends that went back as late as 70's and 80's 'disappeared'. The Russians kept their 'black lists' for many years. My mom's friend who went back to the Ukraine after her slave labor at the end of WWII disappeared. My mom missed the train, thank God, and stayed in Austria. My dad went AWOL from the Russian army in austria at the end of the war and was definately on the black list. When we visited my parents families, they still had wells and outhouses-no indoor plumbing. They cut their hay for thier one milk cow with a sickle and stacked it to dry. They had electricity but no refrigerator. The store shelves were still very bare two years after the breakup. The soviets took anything they could and threw perishables into the river. When I showed up at the hospital with antibiotics and eyedrops, I was treated like royalty. I literaly brought more with me than what they had available. Most of us are much luckier than we realize. -- Anna Southern Ohio
