Mother of 1933

“The Last Way” depicts a young man exhausted by hunger, pulling a corpse on a carriage through a village. Fellow villagers, also affected by hunger, watch helplessly, unable to help.

“Mother of 1933”: against the backdrop of ripe wheat, a dead mother is depicted on her daughter’s lap. A small child with a swollen stomach from starvation clings to his mother’s body, trying to wake her up.

“Children of the Holodomor”: starving children and their mother are sitting on the doorstep of their own house. The children are extremely exhausted from hunger. The mother’s legs are already beginning to swell from starvation. A boy is approaching them, begging for food. However, the family clearly has nothing to eat, neither for him nor for themselves.

“The Road of Sorrow” depicts starving peasants mourning the dead and watching a carriage carrying corpses to a burial pit.

The author of these paintings is Nina Marchenko. The Ukrainian artist painted these pictures in the 1990s, when the USSR collapsed and with it the ban on the truth about the crimes of Soviet totalitarianism.

From the private collection of Morgan Williams.