writes about war from a young person's view #bannedbyrussia
Last Wednesday I had the pleasure to speak with these articulate students from Juda Wisconsin. The session went well beyond the usual hour because in addition to talking about Don’t Tell the Nazis and the Holocaust, we discussed Putin’s authoritarian regime and the horrific assaults on Ukraine right now, and how reading history informs the present. Thank you, Juda students, for your well-considered questions, your compassion and empathy.
Since this mad war began, my virtual visits have continued but students’ questions have changed. My WWII books give context and history to Putin’s expansionist fantasies. They also help students step into the shoes of a Ukrainian on the ground during times of the past that were much like today.
But while I can compartmentalize my rage and despair long enough to do the presentations, I haven’t been keeping up with posting photos of all the smart, inquisitive, and compassionate young people that I get to meet. So here is a gallery.
In this interview I recommended that kids donate to their local Red Cross because here in Brantford they could go to the Red Cross building and donate their allowance. Since then, the international Red Cross is thinking of opening an office in Rostov-On-Don, which is a tacit condoning of Russia’s mass kidnapping of Ukrainians whose cities they’ve destroyed. More info in this Reuters news article. Info about donating here.
My Ukrainian grandparents homesteaded in Alberta in the early 1900s and they never would have survived had it not been for the friendship and kindness of the Indigenous peoples who were already there.
In WWI, Ukrainian immigrants and other new immigrants were scapegoated by our government and labeled as enemies of their adopted country. Thousands were interned in camps across the country and forced into back-breaking work.
My two novels set during the WWI internment operations both reference the interaction between Indigenous people and Ukrainian immigrants. Why? Because the internment camps were often built on the hunting grounds of an Indigenous community, so while Ukrainians and other immigrants were unjustly interned by the federal government, Indigenous communities lost their traditions and their source of food. A double slap of intolerance.
Here’s more about those two books:
Dance of the Banished is partly set in the Kapuskasing internment camp, a complex that destroyed a Cree hunting area. There is interaction between the internees and the Cree community.
Prisoners in the Promised Land is set in Spirit Lake Quebec with the internment camp on the destroyed hunting area of the Pikogan community. Anya encounters members of the community.
My WWII novel Stolen Girl also has a Ukrainian-Indigenous connection. That novel, about orphaned Nadia who settles into Brantford Ontario with her adoptive refugee parents after the war. The neighbourhood they move into is mostly refugees and Indigenous people because my research bore that out. Nadia’s best friend at school is an Indigenous girl.
Do you know of other books that explore this Ukrainian-Indigenous connection? Please let me know if you do and I will list them on this page.
Kokum’s Babushka is a picture book treatment.
Also, Larry Warwaruk’s novels:
It was a fun couple of days presenting to all of the 5th grade students from Riverside Elementary in Evans GA over the course of two sessions, and then catching up with two schools who had been scheduled for quick drop-ins for World Read-Aloud Day but who got ice-stormed out.
It was a small but mighty group in St. Louis MO made up of avid readers who asked GREAT questions. Their teacher emailed later to let me know that one of her students left the meeting completely in AWE and said “my year has been made!” Isn’t that the kind of feedback that melts an author’s heart?
During one of the sessions with Riverside, a student who is writing a big fat fantasy novel with a friend came up to the screen and we had a GREAT discussion about what to do when you write yourself into a corner. At St. Pat’s in MI, we had a great conversation about how those things that challenge us also become our gifts.
I miss seeing readers in person, so it’s great to meet with kids through the ether this way.
Such a pleasure to visit with engaged students.
Nyl is just trying to stay alive. Ever since the Soviet dictator, Stalin, started to take control of farms like the one Nyl’s family lives on, there is less and less food to go around. On top of bad harvests and a harsh winter, conditions worsen until it’s clear the lack of food is not just chance… but a murderous plan leading all the way to Stalin.
Alice has recently arrived from Canada with her father, who is here to work for the Soviets… until they realize that the people suffering the most are all ethnically Ukrainian, like Nyl. Something is very wrong, and Alice is determined to help.
Desperate, Nyl and Alice come up with an audacious plan that could save both of them—and their community. But can they survive long enough to succeed?
Known as the Holodomor, or death by starvation, Ukraine’s Famine-Genocide in the 1930s was deliberately caused by the Soviets to erase the Ukrainian people and culture. Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch brings this lesser-known, but deeply resonant, historical world to life in a story about unity, perseverance, and the irrepressible hunger to survive.
HREC ED teaching resources on the Holodomor here.
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Reviews:
New York Times: Skrypuch handles difficult themes with intelligence and honesty
Historical Novel Society: This is an excellent and terrible book. Well-written, it includes convincing and sympathetic characters, and it bears witness to an awful historical event: Stalin’s partially successful attempt between 1930 and 1933 to starve Ukraine to death. Its author, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, is, in her own words, “fierce in her pursuit of truth.”
School Library Connection: This fast-paced novel will engage readers who will easily relate to Nyl and his siblings. The death by starvation of the millions of people of Ukraine is a relatively unknown historical fact
but important in understanding the will of the current Ukrainian people to resist Putin and contemporary Russia.
Publishers Weekly: A timely, hard-hitting novel.
Canadian Materials: Highly Recommended
Helen Kubiw’s CanlitforlittleCanadians: Winterkill is a big story. It is so big that I can’t possibly reveal all the details and nuances of Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s story in a short review. There are good people and evil ones, both Ukrainian and Russian. There is joy and heartache, resourcefulness and laziness, greed and generosity. And there is oppression. Though much of Winterkill deals with the Holodomor, the 1932-1933 genocide of Ukrainians by starvation, it’s a story that’s bigger than that. It’s about that oppression of people and culture. There is resilience, as Nyl demonstrates with his story, but there is death and destruction and horrific suffering. And Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch tells it with such authenticity that this book of historical fiction could be a biography. Still, she tells it with sensitivity and compassion and allowed this Ukrainian-Canadian to read it with appreciation, albeit filled with sorrow.
I had the pleasure of doing a presentation with Tuan Ho for his daughter’s class yesterday about Tuan’s escape by boat from Vietnam after the war as recounted in our book, Adrift at Sea, published by Pajama Press. I hope our visit inspired students to ask their own parents and grandparents about their own early life. There are many silent heroes walking among us.
A winter storm didn’t stop these students from Fishers Indiana from participating in World Read-Aloud Day! I love how intently they’re listening as I read the beginning of Traitors Among Us.
