There are stories that link the past with the present through the eyes of the same family, but rarely is the same purpose fulfilled by skipping generations; Family Album is one of those stories. The film is a documentary that follows photographer Samara Pearce as she travels to Ukraine in 2023, to the city of Kharkiv, where her great-grandfather Alexander Wienerberger witnessed the Holodomor.
Wienerberger was an Austrian chemical engineer who worked for 19 years in the Soviet Union. He lived in Kharkiv, the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in the early 1930s. Horrified by what was happening before his eyes, Wienerberger began secretly photographing hunger lines in front of food stores, starving children, corpses lying in the streets, and mass graves, capturing in a hundred photographs the immense crime that the Soviet Union was trying to conceal. With the help of the Austrian embassy, Wienerberger sent the negatives by diplomatic courier and himself returned to Vienna in 1934, where he handed the photographs to Cardinal Theodor Innitzer. The Cardinal and the secretary general of the European Congress of Nations, Ewald Ammende, then presented them to the League of Nations. In 1942, Wienerberger wrote a diary in which he recounted everything he saw during the Holodomor, and some of his notes are used as a thread in the documentary.
On her journey, Samara not only finds the story of the past, but is confronted with the terrible reality of the present: Kharkiv no longer suffers the ravages of famine, but rather the destruction and death caused by the invasion. “The Russians shell residential buildings, hospitals and even schools. More than 5,000 residential buildings have been damaged,” says Yevhen Zakharov, director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, who does not hesitate to say that history is repeating itself:
There has never been such an influx of crimes against humanity in Europe since the end of World War II: torture, forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia … In the 1930s, in the Holodomor, and now, Russia has the same goal: to eliminate the Ukrainian people.
After leaving Kharkiv and the shattered buildings of her northernmost neighborhood, Samara meets a direct witness to the Holodomor, Mariia Hudzenko. A centenarian who lived through the famine as a child, she relates her own experiences:
We were a simple peasant family, the richest families were deported to Siberia … My father gave his horse and everything we had to the state, but he had the great idea of mixing the grain with the straw so they wouldn’t confiscate it. Thanks to that we survived. There was no food reserve, and what there was, they took it all.
According to director Maryna Tkachuk and executive producer Zlatan Yefimenko, Mariya died at her home in Ukraine on the day after the documentary was completed.
The journey continues with images of villages emptied and destroyed by the Russian occupiers, while Wienerberger’s diary describes very similar scenes from the last century. One of the neighbors recalls, “They treated us like animals. They felt they were the masters and did what they wanted. They are inhuman.” Such cruelty has many names in Ukraine, and one of them is Izium, where 28 torture chambers and mass graves containing more than 400 bodies were discovered after the Russians were expelled. Dmytro Hrynchak, head of the Izium police department, explains that “the temporary Soviet detention center was closed for many years, but the Russians opened it and put hundreds of the town’s residents there because they were pro-Ukrainian.” A resident of Izium, who had the terrible task of burying the victims under the threat of the occupiers, walks among the graves and recalls what he witnessed: “Here we buried 17 Ukrainian soldiers who had been executed. They had broken hands, tied behind their backs with wires, and broken feet.”
Many fear that what happened in Izium, Bucha, and Mariupol is a prelude to what awaits a Russian-occupied Ukraine, and therefore there is no room for surrender. Samara finds several officers of the Kraken special unit training in a ring, and for these men this is a war for survival. One, named ‘Fly,’ explains, “My motivation is that my son does not live in a cellar and that I am not afraid that something will happen to my family. I want to see the free country for which my grandparents fought and for which we are fighting now.” Another, named ‘Insurgent,’ adds that, “Russia is not only an aggressor country, it is a terrorist machine that will not stop until it has eliminated everything.” These opinions are shared by ordinary soldiers, people who left their jobs in civilian life to join the Ukrainian armed forces: “Without help we will lose, and then famine and slavery will follow. Russia cannot be allowed to win, lest 1933 be repeated.”
The year 1933 is seared into the Ukrainian conscience. The death toll remains unclear, but the most conservative estimates put the figure at around four million. The ill-fated Soviet collectivization caused famine elsewhere in the Soviet Union, but in Ukraine hunger became a weapon to wipe out the Ukrainian peasantry. Nataliia Romanets of the Holodomor Museum explains that, “In 1930, there were 4,000 Ukrainian peasant uprisings involving one million people. That’s when Stalin uttered the famous phrase, ‘We can lose Ukraine,’ and in order not to lose it, they resorted to genocide through famine.” Russia continues to deny the crime, and monuments to Holodomor victims have been destroyed in occupied Ukrainian territory.
Alexander Wienerberger is buried in Salzburg, and since his grave was found a few years ago, it has been cared for by the Ukrainian community in Austria. The film shows a group of young Ukrainian scouts paying tribute to him, while the narrator reads one of the most revealing passages from his diary:
A driver approached me and asked if I was a foreigner. “Yes,” I said.
He leaned towards me coming very close: “Do you not see what is happening in this country, do you not understand anything or is your heart made of stone?”
“Of course, comrade, I see it,” was my somewhat cold reply. “But what can I do even if I want to?”
“Dear comrade,” he raised his hands imploringly. “You are a foreigner, you can escape from this hellish den whenever you want to. Tell in your homeland what they are doing here to us. Europe has to help us. Don’t leave here without promising me that you will raise your voice to accuse these murderers before the tribunal of the world’s conscience.”
“Yes,” I said, “I promise.” We said goodbye and I walked home through the dark streets. I kept my promise.
Alexander Wienerberger kept his promise and let the world know the truth about the horrible crime of the Holodomor. His great-granddaughter Samara, thanks to Maryna Tkachuk and the crew of this film, has honored that promise by reminding us of her ancestor’s courage to tell all that happened then and, at the same time, remind us of what is happening now. Samara says that, “The Ukrainian spirit is love for its land, for its people. And there is nothing in this world that will make Ukrainians stop being Ukrainians,” certain that, with this war, Putin has achieved the opposite of what he intended; for instead of managing to wipe Ukraine off the map, he has made the whole world see it. Still, the hardest part remains, which is for the world to understand Ukraine, because to understand the present we must know the past. Family Album helps to fulfil that mission.
