She had been a young girl of six or seven, running up to the kitchen door of the big house, carrying blueberries in her apron, and receiving from my grandfather’s sister a spoonful of hot blackberry jam. After that, the Bolshevik Revolution came, my family fled, the church was closed, and Soviet agents from the city eventually confiscated the grain, took away the kulaks, and left everyone to starve. The Holodomor, the famine that Stalin inflicted on Ukraine, reduced people who had farmed the richest soil in Europe to eating grass.Then came the war, when the Nazis set the village thatches alight and massacred the local Jewish population. The old woman sat next to me in the church and told me her story; at the end, she leaned her thin body against mine and began to howl.Opinion: Shifting the paradigm in UkraineLast month, a Russian missile blew apart an apartment building in the center of Lviv.