Kamilah Kashanie: And now, a piece of Ukrainian history you might not be aware of.

In the early 1930s…several million Ukrainian men, women and children starved in the Holodomor, a genocide inflicted through Soviet agricultural policies. 

Growing up as an immigrant in France, Halyna Hrushetsky  had no idea her parents had lived through this. 

At StoryCorps, she told her daughter, Oryna, about when she found out.

Halyna Hrushetsky (HH) : My mother, she was always very, very protective. And she always wanted to tell me a story, but I felt in her voice that it was tragic and I didn’t want to hear.

But finally, she started telling me that I had five siblings. And during the genocide in 1932-33, the little one, Halynka, died, because they had nothing to eat. And she named me by her name. I was carrying a dead child’s name. It was very shocking to me. 

But it was the first time that, at least, I heard a bit of the story that my parents lived through.

And we, as a family, came to the United States in the Fall of 1956. And at age 19, as I was learning English, I started to learn all about Ukraine. And it has changed my life to find out who I was. I am still bound. This is… it’s my blood running there too.

Oryna Hrushetsky-Schiffman (OHS): What part of Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian experience would you most like your children and grandchildren to preserve?  

HH: Love. And its beauty, its music. This is what I want the most for them to preserve and to pass along. This is how you bound the children to your culture—is the traditions.