On 7 July 1945, Holodomor researcher, Doctor of Historical Sciences Valentyna Borysenko was born

On July 7, Holodomor researcher and Doctor of Historical Sciences Valentyna Borysenko turns 80. We sincerely congratulate Valentyna on her anniversary and thank her for her crucial contribution to the restoration of the truth about the Holodomor. We wish her good health, inner peace, and many years of happiness!

Valentyna Borysenko was born in the Vinnytsia region. She graduated from the Faculty of History at Kyiv State University and chose ethnology as her field of study. Since the 1970s, she has participated in numerous ethnographic expeditions. Conversations often revolved around the events of the 1930s, which marked a spiritual turning point in the culture and life of the Ukrainian village.”At first, I didn’t understand anything. When I was a child, I heard a little about the famine. But they didn’t talk about it at school. My mother didn’t want to talk about it at home either,” recalls Valentyna.

People only began sharing this truth when the topic of the Holodomor was no longer taboo. ‘Until the 1990s, people had been afraid to talk about it,’ says Valentyna. “In one village, I remember a woman telling me a little about the famine, and when I wanted to write down her name, she refused: ‘I won’t tell you, otherwise they will come and kill me.’ And after 1991, and even in the ‘exclusion zone’, we were no longer afraid of anything. And those stories were so tragic that it seemed impossible to bear. At the end, most often, there was a phrase: ‘That’s life, my dear…’. That’s how I titled one of my books.”

Subsequently, Valentyna Borysenko developed the first questionnaire programme for collecting testimonies about the Holodomor, offering researchers a methodology for recording the oral history of the Holodomor. It was this questionnaire that became the basis for collecting testimonies, including for the National Book of Memory of the Holodomor Victims. Some of these records have been transferred to the museum’s collection and published on our resource ‘Testimonies’.