The museum has received Jerry Berman’s complete collection of letters

Nearly fifty letters from engineer Jerry Berman, who worked in Ukraine in the 1930s and witnessed the Holodomor, have been added to our museum’s collection. Samara Pearce, the great-granddaughter of Austrian engineer Alexander Wienerberger, who is currently in Ukraine with her husband, brought these letters, which are of great value to us, from the UK. A formal handover ceremony took place today at the museum, attended by Director General Lesia Hasydzhak.

In 2016, British researcher Alison Marshall discovered a collection of letters at her mother’s home in Manchester, written by her grandparents, Meyer and Sonia Fortes, to their friend Jerry Berman. Together with Jerry’s son, Peter Berman, Alison spent years restoring information about the origin of the letters, establishing the chronology and history of the correspondence, and reconstructing the author’s biography. As it turned out, Jerry Berman was working in the Luhansk region at the height of the Holodomor.

In 2021, Ms Marshall personally brought the letters to Ukraine, in which Jerry bears witness to the genocide of Ukrainians, and donated some of them to the Holodomor Museum’s collection. The rest of the correspondence had remained in Alison Marshall’s personal archive until recently. This year, Ms Marshall made a momentous decision and kindly donated the remainder of this unique collection to the museum’s archives.

We express our warmest and sincerest gratitude to Alison Marshall for her support of the Museum and for her personal contribution to returning this extremely important cultural heritage from abroad to Ukraine.

The Museum’s collections now hold the entire known array of Jerry Berman’s correspondence. The preservation of the complete collection of letters in a single archive opens new opportunities for its research, exhibition, and use in the cause of restoring historical justice.

The newly donated items include: original manuscripts by Jerry Berman from the Luhansk region, dating from 1928–1933, as well as a collection of postcards from 1932–1933. In addition, last year Alison Marshall published a study dedicated to the extraordinary life of her grandparents: her grandmother and grandfather, the renowned anthropologist Meyer Fortes, one of the main recipients of Jerry Berman’s letters from Ukraine. We are grateful for the copy of the book donated to the Museum!

We also express our heartfelt gratitude to a long-standing and dear friend of our institution, Samara Pearce, who kindly agreed to bring the correspondence from the UK to the Museum.