Bearing Witness to the Holodomor: Eyewitness and Survivor Collections of the Early Cold War Period (1947–55)

In the decade after World War II, Holodomor survivors and eyewitnesses in the West were able to tell their story in a variety of settings. This article examines the creation of four collections of first-hand accounts in Canada and the US—the Oseredok collection (1947–48), the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (1949–52), the Genocide Hearings in the US Senate (1950), and the Hearings of the House Select Committee on Communist Aggression (1954). The early Cold War, it is argued, empowered Soviet Ukrainian refugees to talk about the Holodomor. For a brief historical moment, it also provided them with a public space and a receptive audience willing to acknowledge their suffering.