Motl Derbaremdiker was born in 1920 in Berdichev. He traces his ancestry to Hasidic Tsadik Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev. His father was a soap maker and later became the manager of a soap and soda shop. His mother worked as a seamstress. Motl studied at a heder and then at a Yiddish school for seven grades. In 1936 he moved to Kiev to study chemistry at the Institute of Leather Industry. During the war, he was evacuated to Samara (Kuibyshev), and he returned to Kiev in 1945, where he settled. After postgraduate studies at the Kiev Light Industry University, he worked as a research engineer in a factory.
A Great Hunger Myth
Kyiv, Ukraine
In 1931, the Soviet central government's insistence on meeting outrageous procurement quotas and their obstinate refusal to yield to local needs, combined with climactic conditions, created a massive famine in 1932-1933 that left some 2.5 to 3.5 million people dead. Today, many historians believe the famine was manufactured as a deliberate policy to punish the people of Ukraine for their resistance to collectivization. Some view it as a counterpart to the Holocaust and have come to understand it as "the Hidden Holocaust" or the "Unknown Holocaust." Even the neologism commonly used to describe the 1932-1933 famine, Holodomor--literally, murder by famine--is a semantic counterpart to Holocaust, complete with the same first four letters of the word.
Although an untold number of Jews died of starvation during the Great Famine, there is a widespread myth that Jews were the instigators rather than among the victims of the Great Famine.
In this clip, Motl Derbaremdiker of Berdychiv insists that “it is a lie that only Ukrainians died in the hunger.”