Zombie History Stalks Ukraine

Sonia’s reproach is not the innocent hyperbole of a babushka. Nothing is innocent in zombie history. Sonia is the one who didn’t eat for three days, likely more. Her mother died soon after she was born, and when she was 3 or 4, she tells the narrator, her father left her on the steps of an orphanage and said he’d be right back with some pampushky, garlic rolls. Instead he walked to the gatehouse of a factory and died. It was 1932, the first year of the Holodomor, a horrific famine in which close to 4 million Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin’s monstrous agricultural policies, possibly deliberately. The orphanage took Sonia in but soon could manage to feed the orphans only three beans a day. She ran away and somehow made it home, to a large farmstead that had been turned into a commissary for the Communist Party elite. For lack of anything better to do, she went to the cemetery, lay down on her mother’s gravestone, and screamed for three days. Thereafter she spoke “almost inaudibly, her voice more like the rasp of an old wooden door.” How she survived is unclear. She had “an incredible, innate strength,” the narrator says.