Two Regimes (A Memoir): The Holodomor and the Holocaust in Ukraine
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2023
Pages: 218
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2023
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Teodora Verbitskaya’s remarkable memoir, Two Regimes, is an exceptionally welcome voice in the literature on the Holocaust and Holodomor. The unvarnished directness of Verbitskaya’s observations enable readers to acquire a glimpse into her reality and, thus, to empathize with her and her family. But Verbitskaya’s having experienced and survived the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and World War II also make the memoir a microcosm of Ukraine’s horrific twentieth-century encounter with mass violence and a useful reminder that the regimes responsible for the Holodomor and the Holocaust bear some striking similarities.
Alexander J. Motyl
Professor of Political Science
Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, USA
From the Author Luci Vanilar
My beloved Babusya, Teodora Yefremovna Verbitskaya, was born in the village of what is now Hrunivka, in Sums’ka Oblast, Ukraine, in the year 1900. Her life was difficult and tragic. Her mother died in 1905; her father remarried; her only brother also died young; her husband was an irresponsible man prone to drink. Terrifying social and political upheaval came, followed by the Holodomor, and then the Nazi invasion. She managed to endure throughout it all.
My grandmother took care of me from my birth until I left home at age seventeen, as my mother was an extremely driven artist who painted day and night. All of my fondest memories from childhood include my grandmother. She shared with me her knowledge of traditional Ukrainian village life: handicrafts, cooking, sewing, and the harvesting of herbs, nuts, berries, and mushrooms. From her, I learned to read and write Imperial Russian, the official, enforced Czarist language of her youth.
I watched during my childhood as she sobbed while she wrote this memoir, and I listened as she read and re-read it to me, countless times over the years. I cried with her at the heartbreak, horrors, and afflictions that she described.
I am even more deeply touched by her story now because I too am a mother and grandmother. I have tried to embody my Babusya’s spirit for the entirety of my own life: her strength, her courage, her ingenuity, and her perseverance. Like her, I would do everything in my power to protect my family.
My grandmother was not a political analyst nor a social commentator. The political facts that she presented in her writings are no more than any simple citizen living in a time of dangerous political turmoil would have been aware of, in order to try to shield themselves from harm. I am also just a layperson. I have added very basic explanatory footnotes and maps, for additional understanding. There are volumes of specific research materials available elsewhere from historical experts for anyone wishing to delve into these areas further. My footnotes are meant to be simply a starting point to encourage the reader to research more about interesting cultural and historical details in my grandmother’s account. I have included footnote access dates on most of the citations because much of this information was gathered from sources that were available prior to the Russian Federation’s full scale military invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
This is not a political narrative. This is a description of a devout and fervent motherhood, of a woman who desperately tried to preserve the lives and safety of her two little daughters, while her simple country life was transformed through the terror of two regimes.
List of Painting Illustrations
List of Photograph Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Audio Credits
Quotes from Holodomor Experts
Quotes from Holocaust Experts
Introduction
Maps
Part I
Part II
Epilogue
Author’s Biography
Artist’s Biography
Translator’s Biography
Appendix of Footnotes
Two Regimes Additional Resources
Born in Tehran, Iran in 1959, Luci was raised by her grandmother, while her mother was occupied with a career as a professional artist and her father’s job as an American diplomat caused him to travel much of the time.
Luci attended American primary and secondary schools in Germany.
Teodora taught Luci traditional Ukrainian handicrafts, culinary skills, and folklore, nurturing in her a lifelong love for nature and wildcrafting.
Luci’s drawing, oil painting, and sculpture training began before she was old enough to walk or talk, with her mother as her first art instructor. By age 10 Luci had joined a professional art guild in Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany, doing figure studies, painting, lithography, and serigraphy. Nadia took her often on painting excursions, also including Luci’s childhood paintings in her own gallery exhibitions and outdoor art shows.
The family summered on the Adriatic Sea coast of Italy every year, often visiting historical art exhibitions in Venice and Rome. As a teenager, Luci spent many hours with her mother in every major art museum in Europe, painting and sketching copies of Great Masters’ works. After graduating from high school, she studied at the University of Maryland in München, Bayern, Germany, then traveled around Europe, living for a time in London, England. She returned to München to study art at the Blocherer Kunstschule.
A native Imperial Russian speaker, Luci worked as a live broadcast assistant for the Russian Newsdesk at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in München.
Relocating to the United States in 1979, she attended the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, USA. Continuing to travel, Luci explored much of the United States while furthering her ethnobotanical and indigenous arts studies.
In conjunction with her career as a commercial artist in the advertising, printing and sign industries, Luci is also a journeyman blacksmith, leatherworker, fiber artist, woodcrafter, writer, and teaches art, world ethnobotanical practices, and comparative religious studies. As a hobby, she designs and builds Roma-style Travelers’ wagons, inspired by her early travels in England.
Teodora Verbitskaya’s remarkable memoir, Two Regimes, is an exceptionally welcome voice in the literature on the Holocaust and Holodomor. The unvarnished directness of Verbitskaya’s observations enable readers to acquire a glimpse into her reality and, thus, to empathize with her and her family. But Verbitskaya’s having experienced and survived the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and World War II also make the memoir a microcosm of Ukraine’s horrific twentieth-century encounter with mass violence and a useful reminder that the regimes responsible for the Holodomor and the Holocaust bear some striking similarities.
Alexander J. Motyl
Professor of Political Science
Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, USA
The story told by Two Regimes is remarkable, as is the story about how it was discovered and came to be shared through the efforts of Mimi Shaw and Kelly Bowen. Simply put, it is a story of survival, against great odds, of a family that lived through a civil war, two decades of brutal Soviet tyranny, the Second World War and the terror unleashed by the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. The memoir by Teodora Verbitskaya, and the paintings and sketches by her daughter, Nadia, document a violent era that spanned the artificial famine, or Holodomor, in Soviet Ukraine, the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s, and the Holocaust that ravaged Jewish communities caught up in the brutal dictatorship of Hitler’s Third Reich. A great debt is owed to Mimi Shaw and Kelly Bowen for rescuing from oblivion this unique and personal record of man’s inhumanity to man as well as the ultimate triumph of the human spirit in the face of incredible adversity.
Jars Balan, Director, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
The Holodomor (man-made famine in Ukraine of 1932–33) was denied by the perpetrators, the Soviet authorities, from the time of its occurrence until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those who survived and witnessed the famine in Ukraine did not dare discuss this taboo subject and could not commemorate the dead. Thus, Teodora Verbitskaya’s memoir Two Regimes and the paintings of her daughter Nadia are incredibly valuable as eyewitness testaments to events that Soviet officials did their utmost to hide. Mimi Shaw, Kelly Bowen, and now also, Luci Vanilar, are to be commended for preserving and sharing these rare and moving personal accounts of a family during times of unspeakable horror, both under Soviet and Nazi rule.
Marta Baziuk, Executive Director, Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (
HREC) Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
https://holodomor.ca
Two Regimes is a powerful but ever so painful memoir of a woman who lived through Stalin’s famine in Ukraine and witnessed Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Twice cursed by history, we are twice blessed with Teodora Vebitskaya’s commitment to memory and the talent of her daughter Nadia’s haunting paintings.
Michael Berenbaum, Director
Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust
Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies American Jewish University, Los Angeles, California, USA
As a Holocaust Educator and consultant as well as a Jewish Child Survivor of The Holocaust of 1933–1945, I am frequently asked to review curriculum and projects meant for Educational use on the subject of the Holocaust. When I first met with Kelly Bowen, one of the owners and co-editors of the exhibit and book Two Regimes. I was not aware of this very interesting piece of Holocaust history. After meeting with Kelly Bowen numerous times and researching the Two Regimes exhibit and the history, I am impressed enough with the work done that I do wish to add my name in recommending and supporting this very worthwhile project for classroom use and for museum exhibits. Both the exhibit and the book and curriculum lessons of Two Regimes will greatly assist teachers in meeting the mandate to teach the Nazi Holocaust of 1933–1945. I highly recommend this very worthy project.
Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff
Holocaust Education Consultant, Miami Beach, Florida, USA
Teodora Verbitskaya’s remarkable memoir, Two Regimes, is an exceptionally welcome voice in the literature on the Holocaust and Holodomor. The unvarnished directness of Verbitskaya’s observations enable readers to acquire a glimpse into her reality and, thus, to empathize with her and her family. But Verbitskaya’s having experienced and survived the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and World War II also make the memoir a microcosm of Ukraine’s horrific twentieth-century encounter with mass violence and a useful reminder that the regimes responsible for the Holodomor and the Holocaust bear some striking similarities.
Alexander J. Motyl
Professor of Political Science
Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, USA
From the Author Luci Vanilar
My beloved Babusya, Teodora Yefremovna Verbitskaya, was born in the village of what is now Hrunivka, in Sums’ka Oblast, Ukraine, in the year 1900. Her life was difficult and tragic. Her mother died in 1905; her father remarried; her only brother also died young; her husband was an irresponsible man prone to drink. Terrifying social and political upheaval came, followed by the Holodomor, and then the Nazi invasion. She managed to endure throughout it all.
My grandmother took care of me from my birth until I left home at age seventeen, as my mother was an extremely driven artist who painted day and night. All of my fondest memories from childhood include my grandmother. She shared with me her knowledge of traditional Ukrainian village life: handicrafts, cooking, sewing, and the harvesting of herbs, nuts, berries, and mushrooms. From her, I learned to read and write Imperial Russian, the official, enforced Czarist language of her youth.
I watched during my childhood as she sobbed while she wrote this memoir, and I listened as she read and re-read it to me, countless times over the years. I cried with her at the heartbreak, horrors, and afflictions that she described.
I am even more deeply touched by her story now because I too am a mother and grandmother. I have tried to embody my Babusya’s spirit for the entirety of my own life: her strength, her courage, her ingenuity, and her perseverance. Like her, I would do everything in my power to protect my family.
My grandmother was not a political analyst nor a social commentator. The political facts that she presented in her writings are no more than any simple citizen living in a time of dangerous political turmoil would have been aware of, in order to try to shield themselves from harm. I am also just a layperson. I have added very basic explanatory footnotes and maps, for additional understanding. There are volumes of specific research materials available elsewhere from historical experts for anyone wishing to delve into these areas further. My footnotes are meant to be simply a starting point to encourage the reader to research more about interesting cultural and historical details in my grandmother’s account. I have included footnote access dates on most of the citations because much of this information was gathered from sources that were available prior to the Russian Federation’s full scale military invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
This is not a political narrative. This is a description of a devout and fervent motherhood, of a woman who desperately tried to preserve the lives and safety of her two little daughters, while her simple country life was transformed through the terror of two regimes.
List of Painting Illustrations
List of Photograph Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Audio Credits
Quotes from Holodomor Experts
Quotes from Holocaust Experts
Introduction
Maps
Part I
Part II
Epilogue
Author’s Biography
Artist’s Biography
Translator’s Biography
Appendix of Footnotes
Two Regimes Additional Resources
Born in Tehran, Iran in 1959, Luci was raised by her grandmother, while her mother was occupied with a career as a professional artist and her father’s job as an American diplomat caused him to travel much of the time.
Luci attended American primary and secondary schools in Germany.
Teodora taught Luci traditional Ukrainian handicrafts, culinary skills, and folklore, nurturing in her a lifelong love for nature and wildcrafting.
Luci’s drawing, oil painting, and sculpture training began before she was old enough to walk or talk, with her mother as her first art instructor. By age 10 Luci had joined a professional art guild in Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany, doing figure studies, painting, lithography, and serigraphy. Nadia took her often on painting excursions, also including Luci’s childhood paintings in her own gallery exhibitions and outdoor art shows.
The family summered on the Adriatic Sea coast of Italy every year, often visiting historical art exhibitions in Venice and Rome. As a teenager, Luci spent many hours with her mother in every major art museum in Europe, painting and sketching copies of Great Masters’ works. After graduating from high school, she studied at the University of Maryland in München, Bayern, Germany, then traveled around Europe, living for a time in London, England. She returned to München to study art at the Blocherer Kunstschule.
A native Imperial Russian speaker, Luci worked as a live broadcast assistant for the Russian Newsdesk at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in München.
Relocating to the United States in 1979, she attended the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, USA. Continuing to travel, Luci explored much of the United States while furthering her ethnobotanical and indigenous arts studies.
In conjunction with her career as a commercial artist in the advertising, printing and sign industries, Luci is also a journeyman blacksmith, leatherworker, fiber artist, woodcrafter, writer, and teaches art, world ethnobotanical practices, and comparative religious studies. As a hobby, she designs and builds Roma-style Travelers’ wagons, inspired by her early travels in England.
Teodora Verbitskaya’s remarkable memoir, Two Regimes, is an exceptionally welcome voice in the literature on the Holocaust and Holodomor. The unvarnished directness of Verbitskaya’s observations enable readers to acquire a glimpse into her reality and, thus, to empathize with her and her family. But Verbitskaya’s having experienced and survived the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and World War II also make the memoir a microcosm of Ukraine’s horrific twentieth-century encounter with mass violence and a useful reminder that the regimes responsible for the Holodomor and the Holocaust bear some striking similarities.
Alexander J. Motyl
Professor of Political Science
Rutgers University-Newark, New Jersey, USA
The story told by Two Regimes is remarkable, as is the story about how it was discovered and came to be shared through the efforts of Mimi Shaw and Kelly Bowen. Simply put, it is a story of survival, against great odds, of a family that lived through a civil war, two decades of brutal Soviet tyranny, the Second World War and the terror unleashed by the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. The memoir by Teodora Verbitskaya, and the paintings and sketches by her daughter, Nadia, document a violent era that spanned the artificial famine, or Holodomor, in Soviet Ukraine, the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s, and the Holocaust that ravaged Jewish communities caught up in the brutal dictatorship of Hitler’s Third Reich. A great debt is owed to Mimi Shaw and Kelly Bowen for rescuing from oblivion this unique and personal record of man’s inhumanity to man as well as the ultimate triumph of the human spirit in the face of incredible adversity.
Jars Balan, Director, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
The Holodomor (man-made famine in Ukraine of 1932–33) was denied by the perpetrators, the Soviet authorities, from the time of its occurrence until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those who survived and witnessed the famine in Ukraine did not dare discuss this taboo subject and could not commemorate the dead. Thus, Teodora Verbitskaya’s memoir Two Regimes and the paintings of her daughter Nadia are incredibly valuable as eyewitness testaments to events that Soviet officials did their utmost to hide. Mimi Shaw, Kelly Bowen, and now also, Luci Vanilar, are to be commended for preserving and sharing these rare and moving personal accounts of a family during times of unspeakable horror, both under Soviet and Nazi rule.
Marta Baziuk, Executive Director, Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (
HREC) Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
https://holodomor.ca
Two Regimes is a powerful but ever so painful memoir of a woman who lived through Stalin’s famine in Ukraine and witnessed Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Twice cursed by history, we are twice blessed with Teodora Vebitskaya’s commitment to memory and the talent of her daughter Nadia’s haunting paintings.
Michael Berenbaum, Director
Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust
Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies American Jewish University, Los Angeles, California, USA
As a Holocaust Educator and consultant as well as a Jewish Child Survivor of The Holocaust of 1933–1945, I am frequently asked to review curriculum and projects meant for Educational use on the subject of the Holocaust. When I first met with Kelly Bowen, one of the owners and co-editors of the exhibit and book Two Regimes. I was not aware of this very interesting piece of Holocaust history. After meeting with Kelly Bowen numerous times and researching the Two Regimes exhibit and the history, I am impressed enough with the work done that I do wish to add my name in recommending and supporting this very worthwhile project for classroom use and for museum exhibits. Both the exhibit and the book and curriculum lessons of Two Regimes will greatly assist teachers in meeting the mandate to teach the Nazi Holocaust of 1933–1945. I highly recommend this very worthy project.
Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff
Holocaust Education Consultant, Miami Beach, Florida, USA