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Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

© 2023 by the Ukrainian History and Education Center, all rights reserved.

About the exhibition

This exhibition explores some of the ways in which the Holodomor was depicted during the 20th century, particularly though art. The artistic depiction of genocide is challenging. Should horrors be depicted directly and graphically — with skeletons or dead bodies? Or should the approach be more understated, providing the viewers or readers with just enough to allow them to create the images of horror in their own minds? This exhibition explores the extremely varied approaches that artists over more than seven decades have used to tackle the Holodomor.

While many artists and writers were quick to create a substantial body of work about other genocides (such as the Holocaust), depictions of the Holodomor were remarkably sparse prior to the last decade of the 20th century. The Ukrainian History and Education Center is honored to have a significant number of these works in its permanent collection, and this exhibition is built around those items. The exhibition also includes period primary sources that shed light on the Holodomor as a historical event, how it was portrayed in the press, and how Ukrainians in the diaspora responded to it.

We make no attempt at scholarly history or to address the extensive scholarly and popular literature that now exists on the topic. Instead, the historical content of this exhibition focuses on primary sources and other materials that are in the permanent collections of the UHEC. We also do not attempt to present Holodomor commemorations or monuments, despite the fact that these are topics to which the UHEC has a special connection. Either topic could be the subject of an entire exhibition on its own, so we have chosen to not cover those topics in order to keep the scope of the exhibition within realistic bounds. There has been considerable scholarly work on these topics, including an article and a monograph by Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek.

For those interested in more historical detail, there are a number of recent books in English that deal with the Holodomor and its broader context. We particularly recommend Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder and Red Famine by Anne Applebaum.

There are also many excellent online resources on the Holodomor, including the Canadian-based Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv, and the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre in Toronto. These sites include a wealth of historical information, oral histories, educational resources, and other information. We also recommend the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute "MAPA Digital Atlas of Ukraine" Great Famine Project, which includes unique resources related to demographics and cartography.

For a more general overview of Ukrainian history from ancient times through the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, we suggest the concise and very readable account by Serhii Plokhy in The Gates of Europe.

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The UHEC and Holodomor monuments and commemorations