The Holodomor Museum visited Oleksandr Nechyporenko

Yesterday, we came to Boyarka to visit Oleksandr Nechyporenko, the son of Lavro Nechyporenko, the author of the memoirs “The 33rd Year”.

We recorded a long interview with Mr Oleksandr about his family, his father, and Lavro Lavrovych’s work on his memoirs about the Holodomor, how he miraculously escaped repression twice, and how the manuscript of his work “The 33rd Year” was later found in the SBU archives. In November 2020, Mr Oleksandr handed over these memoirs to the Holodomor Museum, and we are currently preparing them for publication.

We also had the opportunity to view an extremely interesting personal collection of antiquities collected by Oleksandr Nechyporenko. It started with a few pots given to him by one woman.

Today, Oleksandr Lavrovych has set up a museum in his parents’ house, the same one where the memoirs “The 33rd Year” were written. There you can see old dishes, clothes, shoes, towels, relics. The collection of photos with images of Ukrainians before the Holodomor is also impressive, which is very revealing: large families, wealthy and well-dressed people… However, collectivization and the Holodomor will soon change everything: some will be exhausted, dekulakized, evicted and destroyed, while others will be turned into submissives and impoverished serfs…

We left Oleksandr Nechyporenko’s museum not only with impressions but also with a gift: one of the towels belonging to the Nechyporenko family and originating from the village of Yerchyky, the Holodomor in which Lavro Lavrovych described in his memoirs, Mr Oleksandr handed over to the collection of our Museum. We will remind you that earlier, the collector had already presented two embroidered towels to our institution: from Yerchyky in the Zhytomyr region (it can be seen today in the exposition of the exhibition “The things which cannot be thrown away”) and from the Chernihiv region with the date “1933” embroidered on it.

We sincerely thank Mr Oleksandr and his wife, Mrs Natalia, for their warm welcome and hospitality. You can later watch and read the interview on the resources of our Museum.