Ukraine's Suffering, depicted in a Sand Animation by Kseniya Simonova

The winner of Ukraine's Got Talent is someone remarkably different from many of the national talent TV shows around the world. Kseniya Simonova moves the audience to tears as she tells the story of Ukraine's World War 2 sufferings using sand:



The final text Kseniya Simonova writes at the end of the piece is in Russian, translated "you are always near" or "you are always close".

And for some background information on Ukraine's suffering:

Nazi Germany’s greatest war crime is the Holocaust, of course, but the genocides against Ukrainians and Belarusians constitute a close second. And yet, while the Holocaust is common knowledge, few know much about the extermination of Ukrainians and Belarusians — and Germans may know about this least of all. The tragedy of these peoples’ suffering in the war has been compounded by the world’s almost complete ignorance and indifference.

That lamentable condition may be about to change, if only among professional historians. In a ground-breaking article that was published in the July 16 issue of The New York Review of Books, Yale University historian Timothy Snyder describes in excruciating detail just how Nazi policy was directed at exterminating first the Jews and then the Slavs. Since Belarus and Ukraine were occupied for almost four years, they suffered enormous population losses.

According to Snyder: “Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country. … The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.”

The devastation that affected both countries is even greater when one considers their experiences in the Stalinist 1930s and in World War I. Ukraine lost at least 3 million people in the genocidal famine of 1933. Both countries also served as the main killing fields of the Eastern Front during World War I (1914-18), the Civil War in Russia (1918-21) and the Polish-Russian War (1919-21).

Ukraine and Belarus experienced nearly 40 consecutive years of relentless death and destruction, starting in 1914 and ending with Stalin’s death in 1953.

Although Soviet Russia bears a great deal of responsibility for the killing, the lion’s share falls on Germany.

And yet Germany, which so assiduously remembers its crimes during the Holocaust, has still to build one monument to the millions of Belarusians and Ukrainians its armies killed in the 20th century.

How can this blindness be explained?

Read the full article here