Despite being direct descendants of Germans, three generations were born in the russian empire, in the Odessa Region (Oblast), now Ukraine, before migrating to Brazil in 1891. The short time I lived in Ukraine was not enough to delve into the history of my ancestors. My great-great-grandparents Heinrich Friedrich Holdorf and Charlotte Lindebaum-Lindemann emigrated from the German north to the southern lands of former Bessarabia.

Heinrich died in 1855, at the age of 70, but saw his children Juliana and Karl die earlier. Karl married Anna Cristina Draht, with whom he had two children, Karolina, born in 1842, and Johann Friedrich, born in 1844. When Anna Cristina was in the sixth month of pregnancy with Justina, who would be the third descendant, Karl died, at just 22 years old. Widowed, Anna had to support a third child. On May 2^nd, 1846, she married another Karl, Hannemann, with whom she gained five more boys and six girls.

One of the girls, Dorothea, would marry Daniel Bogner, with whom she had three children, Gottfried, Rosine and Christine. Dorothea (70) and Gottfried (44) died in the Holodomor, the Great Famine caused by Stalin in Ukraine, murdering more than ten million people between 1932 and 33. Six years later, in 1938, Daniel (74) would be killed during a new purge provoked by Stalin on Ukrainian territory.

As a result of the cowardly and disproportionate russian aggression, I did not have the opportunity to meet descendants supposedly alive and residing in Tarutyno and Borodyno, Odessa Region. After ninety years of this genocide, only seventeen countries have officially and publicly protested, including Brazil, the last to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide by the stalinist Soviet Union against the Ukrainian people. The document received approval from the Federal Senate last year. Слава Українi!

Ruben Dargã Holdorf

Doctor in Communication and Semiotics,

worked as a full-professor at UGI, in Butcha, in 2021-22.