In the village of Ivkivtsi, Chernihiv region, bulldozers razed to the ground a cemetery with the burials of victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933. The village council stated that according to the documents there is no cemetery there, and called the work the improvement of the territory. This is reported by the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide, writes UNN.
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It is noted that the journalists of the local TV channel "Pryluky" were the first to announce the event. They went to the village and saw bulldozers and other equipment working at the mass burial site.
Local residents say that no one warned them about the work at the cemetery. They immediately appealed to the village head with a request to stop the work, because many of them have relatives buried in that place.
Village head Roman Yuvchenko explained that the works on the cemetery site are carried out by the decision of the executive committee and in accordance with the improvement program. He added that the site on which the works are carried out is not indicated as a cemetery in the territorial community plan.
However, the museum emphasized that the cemetery in Ivkivtsi is listed as one of more than a thousand places of mass burial in Ukraine in the geoinformation system "Places of mass burial of victims of the Holodomor-Genocide", which was created by employees of the Holodomor Museum back in 2019.
According to the National Book of Memory, at least 162 people died of starvation in Ivkivtsi during the Holodomor, including a large number of children. And these are only those whose names have been established. Most of the dead are buried here, in the old cemetery. Residents of the village still visit the graves of relatives
The National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide appealed to the head of the Ladan TG and the head of the Pryluky RDA with a message about the value and importance of preserving this burial site of the Holodomor period, as well as with a request to restore order on the memorial territory and properly mark it.