Holodomor Remembrance Day 2004
A candle in the window on the fourth Saturday of November. I learned what it meant in my first months here, and I have lit one every year since.
Today is a day of remembrance, not of greeting.
On the fourth Saturday of November, candles appear in windows across Ukraine for the victims of the famine of 1932 and 1933. In my first autumn here somebody explained the custom to me, briefly and without elaboration, in the way people explain things that do not need selling.
I will not write at length. It is not my grief and I have no standing to interpret it. What I will say is that living in a country teaches you why certain subjects are handled the way they are, and that grain, bread and the land carry a weight here that a visitor does not feel and a resident cannot miss.
A candle in the window this evening. That is all this day asks.
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