Holodomor Remembrance Day, 22 November 2014
A remembrance message in a year when the commemoration was harder to keep separate from the present.
Today Ukraine remembers those who died in the famine of 1932 and 1933.
Every year I have written about this day, I have tried to keep it to what it is: an evening of remembrance for a specific event, in which a country counts people who were not counted at the time.
That is harder this year, and I will not pretend it is not. Commemoration is always read partly through the present, and it would be dishonest to describe tonight as though nothing else were happening.
But the form holds regardless. A candle in the window at the appointed hour, the reading of names, the families who have carried a particular story since a grandmother told it once.
My respect to everyone marking today.
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