Holodomor Remembrance Day, 22 November 2008

Today Ukraine remembers those who died in the famine of 1932 and 1933.

This year is the seventy-fifth anniversary, and the commemoration is larger than usual: the memorial in Kyiv, the exhibitions, the reading of names, delegations from abroad.

Seventy-five years is a specific and difficult distance. It is long enough that almost nobody who remembers it directly is still alive, and short enough that their children are. That is the moment when a memory either gets written down or begins to disappear, and a great deal of recording work has been done this year because people understood that.

Tonight the form is the same as always. A candle in the window at the appointed hour, in houses that cannot see each other.

My respect to everyone marking today.