Two Colours

A nearly century-old mother narrates her life story to her son. This was a life of struggle and tragedy for many Ukrainian people in the twentieth century. In 1917 the revolution a plague with red commissars descended upon Ukraine and her people. Anna my mother said that life turned into red and black colours: red stars and the big black guns of the commissars. Millions died under their unjust oppressive regime and Anna and her family were confined in a dungeon out on the deserted steppes; they were all doomed to perish. The commissars took all the people's grain and other products; the merciless <i>Golodomor</i> suffocation by hunger killed many millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. And very soon there was one more disaster: World War II which stormed through the deeply wounded country killing again many millions because Stalin and the other Kremlin rulers made this possible. My father Ivan was a pilot of a dive-bomber lost his life in the war; like many millions of soldiers he was betrayed by the Communist regime.