Winterkill

 

Winterkill / Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
NY: Scholastic, c2022.
266 p.

The last book I've read this week focusing on Ukraine and the Holodomor is Winterkill by Marsha Skrypuch. She is a well known author of middle grade fiction, who has written on many Ukrainian topics, as well as on some other historical tragedies such as the Armenian genocide. She balances hard stories with a writing style that is aimed at the younger reader, sharing difficult facts in an accessible way. 

This book focuses on the Chorny family, living in Ukraine in early 1930. There are collectivization efforts going on all around them, aiming at having all successful farmers give their land to the state and work the fields for the state (and as it turns out, not being paid or fed for the pleasure). We meet Nyl, a 12 yr old boy with two younger siblings, Slavko and Yulia. As the story opens, he finds two Canadians in his mother's kitchen, inventorying the farm's possessions for the Party. These are people of Ukrainian descent from Canada who decided that the Soviet plan was utopia so left Canada to return to Ukraine and work for Stalin's regime. One of them is Comrade Alice, a girl of Nyl's age, whom he tries to talk to normally. This encounter has long term repercussions for Nyl. 

There are many harsh moments in this story; violence, murder, starvation, death, cruelty. And they are told clearly, but without gratuitous detail. Skrypuch is able to express historical fact with compelling storytelling, at the right level for this audience. Nyl's family breaks down throughout the book, starting with his uncle who is murdered by a Party official. His sister betrays the family, his parents both slowly perish, and he takes his younger brother with him when he escapes his village of Felivka, heading for the larger town of Kharkiv and the possibility of some work (and food) at the tractor factory being built there. 

In Kharkiv, they meet up with Comrade Alice again, by this time quite disillusioned and trying to find a way to get home to Canada, taking photographic evidence of the terror-famine with her. She and Nyl pair up to try to walk out of the famine region of Ukraine to Moscow where she could flee - Nyl just wanting to go far enough to outwalk the famine, which somehow magically limited itself to the areas where Ukrainian peasants lived. (spoiler: it was Stalin's plan to destroy Ukrainian lives and culture). 

This is a book that just has one awful thing happening after another, but it doesn't feel hopeless. There is hope and grit in both Nyl and Alice, and they make it out. But it's not a sugary ending. There are loose ends, no satisfying justice, just survival. Still, there is a sense that there is a future for Nyl. I found this book fascinating, an absorbing read that I couldn't put down. The element of finding Canadians in it was a shock to me - I hadn't known that Canadian citizens had left Canada during the hard years of the Depression, thinking that the idealized Soviet Union would be a better bet. Bad gamble there. Definitely an informative read, which I also found full of daily detail that anchored the story in its time and setting. 

And one other note, about this cover -- I think it's brilliant, with the girl on the cover mirroring the commemorative statue outside the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv. 

To find out more about this book, you can watch Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's interview with HREC.