 Those who lived through the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 are often asked if they remember the most terrifying event they witnessed then. Naturally, their war memories differ, as every individual is a separate universe and walks a different path and has a different fate, but they all say they were unspeakably frightened.
My biography coincides with the war, the period of political repressions and the Holodomor, the Soviet-era famine. I was too young when the war broke out and so did not participate in the warfare. Thus I cannot tell stories resembling those by millions of the Red Army soldiers, who had to suppress their fear and dare death face-to-face, defying bullets and explosions. Nonetheless, I lived under the Germans for three years: sufferings and deaths were everyday companions of my childhood. Two armies passed my hometown in those years. We were lucky they did not stop but we nevertheless saw many soldiers and civilians perish. I was nearly killed twice and even stood by a mass grave where I was supposed to be buried, so there were many reasons to be terrified.
I was convinced for many years that death was not the most terrible thing -
as it is the essence of any war - but being held in captivity!.. I remember captured soldiers of the Red Army, their faces ashamed, doomed and desperate. I was shocked to see how the Germans treated them, shooting dead those who were too exhausted to walk. One, however, can hardly imagine how awful it was, later, to watch our captives being driven like cattle by the retreating Germans. Those were survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, ugly skeletons with grayish faces. Wrathful at their imminent fiasco, the Germans killed them with eerie pleasure. Everyone seeing that picture realized that it was better to be dead than captured. I am sure no artist would be able to portray that helplessness and hopelessness. By the way, I also saw German captives: although squalid and miserable, they had no despair in their eyes.
 Back then I did not know the greatest horror of my life was still to come! At the beginning of the 1990s, I visited a forest in Bykivnya near Kyiv. This place is where thousands of victims of Stalin's repressions of 1936-1941 rest. Hundreds of people were slaughtered every day, their lifeless bodies transported to Bykivnya and hastily buried. The site was fenced to make their executioners confident nobody would disclose this atrocious crime. But a few eyewitnesses survived!
All the victims were charged with being enemies of the Soviet people. In fact, nobody but the Kremlin leaders knew why millions of innocent people were castigated. My father, who was a professional historian, believed that the Kremlin had thus been trying to conceal the traces of its crimes during the Civil War, collectivization and Holodomor, which is why the government exterminated the most active and educated part of the Soviet Union's society.
It must have been really hard to face death without knowing why one should die. It is impossible to imagine bigger injustice than such arbitrary and unjustified murders. The victims were horrified, having no confidence their tormentors would be punished one day and being unable to tell their murderers they detested them.
When I am in the Bykivnya forest, I seem to hear "Why?" in the whisper of its pines. The Soviet leaders wanted to make these martyrs forgotten. They tabooed the memory of the Holodomor and repressions, and no facts appeared until Khrushchev's Thaw and later Gorbachev's perestroika.
 Inveterate partisans of the Communist Party of Ukraine cite poor crops as the main cause of the great famine in 1932, which they cannot dare deny today, but they cannot explain why so many people were repressed. Silence is a reliable method of concealing their crimes. When the Bykivnya site was discovered, the government announced these were the graves of the victims of Nazism. A monument was erected. The people believed it was true because there had been a death camp for military prisoners near the place. Babyi Yar, another German site of mass killings, was not far away.
However, the Kyiv-based organization "Memorial" found eyewitnesses to those killings. The government was made to form three commissions, in 1971, 1987 and 1988-89, the latter proving that the graves in Bykivnya were full of those massacred under Stalin. The government replaced a plaque on the monument, and "To the victims of fascism" became "To the victims of totalitarianism."
In fact, many other such sites had been discovered earlier in Solovki, Kolyma, Kingiri, Vorkuta, as well as on Kharkiv's Cold Hill and in mines of Donetsk and Lugansk.
I first heard of these crimes in 1941 but could not believe it. In 1941, the Germans discovered several mass graves in Vinnytsya. Women in nearby villages even recognized their dead husbands, although their bodies were covered in some chemical substance for faster decomposition. They first thought these people had been killed by the Germans. Only in the 1980s it was proven that they were Stalin's victims.
In the 1990s, Polish researchers announced that they had found remains of three thousand Polish officers killed in the Soviet Union in Bykivnya. They may be right but we cannot say for sure because no systematic investigation had been carried out. To prove there are any Poles in Bykivnya, one needs to excavate the forest. Should we disturb hundreds of thousands of those peacefully resting victims to know the exact figure? Of course, this number has been preserved in Moscow's KGB archives but we will probably never learn the truth.
The Bykivnya forest became a symbol of Stalin's regime. People come there in groups or alone to honor their relatives, tortured in the GULAG camps and prisons. I once saw students and professors of the Boychuk Arts and Design College in the forest. They came to mark the birthday of Boychuk, one of the many victims.
Some visitors tie ribbons or photographs with the names of the dead to the branches. They silently stand or kneel to pray. Even if none of your relatives were executed under Stalin, you still feel guilty there.
On every second Sunday of May we officially honor the victims of political repressions. When Pope John Paul II was in Kyiv, he also prayed in the Bykivnya. There is a monument there shaped like a man in a felt coat, traditionally worn by the GULAG prisoners, and with the date "1937," which is as eloquent in our history as 1933 and 1941-1945.
The government of Ukraine is about to start building a memorial complex in Bykivnya but the project may be delayed because of the political situation. The governing coalition includes two left-wing parties, which have no habit of honoring the victims of communist terror.
There is one more problem - Satanists. They have recently vandalized some graves in Bykivnya. Earlier, nobody in Ukraine knew who they were. This problem is believed to have appeared along with foreign films. But there are no political motives in their actions, for we all remember those tortured to death.
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