Initial results of our expedition ‘Mosaic of History. Episode III’

During our expedition titled “Mosaic of History: Episode III,” we visited 108 settlements across ten regions of Ukraine. We conducted 233 interviews and discovered 11 mass graves of victims from the Holodomor and the man-made famine of 1946–1947. Additionally, we acquired 95 new exhibits for the museum collection.

The expedition, we recall, took place in October and November. Its primary objective was to document eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor and the mass man-made famine of 1946–1947. It was an unforgettable and intense six weeks of work, involving two expedition teams. Our colleagues Yulia Kotsur, Sofia Dyachenko, Roman Moldavskyi, Olha Vyhodovanets, and Anzhela Savchenko accomplished a tremendous amount of work in a short period of time. Each group recorded as many as 5-6 interviews per day!

We are grateful to our respondents and their families for their hospitality, for their willingness to share their experiences, for their emotions, sincerity, and sometimes tears that welled up in their eyes as they recalled the past.

Special thanks to the local communities, social workers, historians, teachers, librarians, museum staff, and all the caring individuals who supported us at various stages of the expedition. Your warm welcome, companionship, communication, sharing of contacts, and assistance to our colleagues made a significant difference. Dear friends, without you, it would have been extremely difficult!

We are extremely grateful to the photographers and videographers who documented the expedition and the respondents’ testimonies, often in conditions of power outages. Your professionalism and readiness for critical situations are outstanding. We are grateful to the transport company and drivers who made our trips along the autumn roads as comfortable as possible, as well as to the logistics company that managed food and accommodation for our team.

The expedition was part of the international technical assistance project ‘Support for Exhibitions at the National Holodomor Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine,’ funded by Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and implemented by Cowater International and the Canada-Ukraine Foundation. We appreciate our partners for recognising the significance of this mission to document and preserve the oral history of Ukraine’s tragic past.

Next, we will process the materials by transcribing, editing, and uploading the recordings to our website’s ‘Testimonies’ section. We will share the most interesting materials on our resources. So stay tuned!