The museum has received eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor, documented in 2008

Vasyl Fursa, a resident of Kharkiv, has donated video recordings that feature eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor from the village of Shkurpely in the Zinkiv district of the Poltava region to the Holodomor Museum. He recorded these videos on a VHS cassette during a visit to his mother in that village in the summer of 2008. “By a strange coincidence, I found a coin in my mother’s vegetable patch at the time: three kopecks, dated 1933. And that’s when I made these recordings – my own, so to speak, three kopecks’ contribution to the history of the Holodomor,” says Mr Vasyl. Based on these testimonies, he compiled a film entitled “The Immortals.” He uploaded it to his YouTube channel. Now, he has decided to donate his “field recordings” to the museum’s collection.

The recordings contain the testimonies of two sisters, Matrona Maksymivna Masiuk, born in 1927, and Yevdokiia Maksymivna Masiuk, born in 1918, as well as Mariia Mykhailivna Fursa, born in 1930, the mother of our giver. All three women are no longer alive. We thank Mr Vasyl for recording and preserving their voices of truth. According to open sources, only 16 people currently live in the village of Shkurpely.

Please contact us at [email protected] if you have similar recordings or your relatives’ memoirs/diaries containing accounts of the Holodomor. These materials are crucial, and we should preserve them.