In Kharkiv, unknown individuals damaged the crosses on the graves of Holodomor victims

In Kharkiv’s Park of Remembrance, unknown people damaged crosses on the graves of Holodomor victims. The damage was discovered on 24 April by municipal services when they arrived to clean up the area. The Kharkiv City Council reported this. The police were called to the scene to investigate the circumstances.

As noted in a post by the Interregional Department of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance in the Kharkiv region, the Park of Remembrance (known as Komsomolskyi until 2007) was established in 1962 on the site of an old Jewish cemetery. Adjacent to the cemetery, in what is now Ivan Kamyshev Street, there was once a children’s home for the homeless, where children picked up from the streets were taken. During the Holodomor, the number of such children rose sharply. The head of the Department of Public Education, a man named Ubyibatko, attempted to organise at least minimal care for those in need, as indicated by his preserved appeals to the city council found in the archives. However, these efforts did not yield significant results.

During excavations in 2003, a mass grave containing the remains of children was discovered in the park. Subsequently, in 2005, a further 30 bodies of Holodomor victims were reburied here from Mashynobudivnykiv Park (formerly Artem Park, situated on the site of the Cyril and Methodius Cemetery). It was the crosses erected in memory of those children that were damaged.

The Park of Remembrance preserves the memory not only of the Holodomor victims. From 9 August 1937 to 11 March 1938, the cemetery was used by the Kharkiv Department of the NKVD as a site for the secret burial of the victims of repression. During this period, 6,865 people were buried here. In 1990, a stone with a plaque was erected in the park, announcing the intention to build a memorial to the victims of repression. However, to this day, it has not been built.

Photo: Kharkiv City Council.