#Eugenia Sakevych Dallas

[dontforgetukraine]

The Holodomor Museum commemorated Eugenia Sakevych Dallas, a witness to the Holodomor, on the anniversary of her passing September 12, 2014.

This is from her memoirs.

"...Mother was arrested for collecting frozen ears of grain. The potbellied NKVD officer contemptuously accused my mother: "You collected the people's goods, stole from the state." After that, they took my mother away from me. She was officially charged with theft of state property and sentenced to three years of hard labour in Siberia near Lake Baikal. I remember her sitting on the porch of the police house, which they had taken from one of the farmers earlier. I could feel the way she was looking at me. She wasn't crying; she was only looking, and I obviously could read her thoughts - there was such pain, there was such sadness. She was looking at me as if she would never see me again. My mother was not sent to Siberia right away. For some time, they kept her in prison near Odesa. She managed to write a letter to Nataliia, informing her that she had no food at all. We also had nothing to eat,but Nataliia had some beets and decided to send my mother a parcel. We also had nothing to eat, but Nataliia had some beets and decided to send a parcel to my mother. But we did not know at all whether those beets reached the mother. Finally, we found out that they sent my mother to Siberia. She never returned from there. Every time I see raw beets, I recall my mother," Sakevych-Dallas wrote in her memoirs.

---

Eugenia was born in 1925 in a wealthy family with many children in the Kamyana Balka in the Mykolaiv region. First, the Soviet authorities took her father away from her - they arrested him in 1929 and confiscated all his property for refusing to join a collective farm. Later, her mother was also arrested and sentenced to imprisonment in the camps, and she never returned from there. Then, her older sister Nataliia, the only relative nearby at that time, died of illness and exhaustion. The Red Moloch, one way or another, destroyed the entire large Sakevych family, which included six children. Zhenia was the youngest of them all. During the Second World War, she ended up in forced labour. Afterwards, she decided to stay abroad. She made a career as a model and had a happy marriage. "... I wanted to forget everything and enjoy life after everything I had experienced. Time passed, but my mental pain could not be erased from my heart." That inspired her to write a memoir titled "Our Soul Does Not Die: The Fate of an Orphan from the Ukrainian Holodomor," as well as a series of drawings dedicated to the Holodomor. Ms Eugenia also became the character of the documentary "Witness Zhenya" (director Serhiy Zabolotny) and the animated film "My name is Eugenia Sakevych Dallas" (author Yuliya Fedorovych). Both films can be viewed freely.