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 Golodomor, 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.