By: Dr. Jerry Bergman
Montpelier, Ohio
I recently presented a lecture at the Glen Rose, Texas, Creation Evidence Museum, and was blessed with one of the largest crowds the museum has seen in over a decade.
Some traveled over 300 miles to attend my presentation. While there, I learned from one of the attendees about one of the most tragic events in history, which I was able to verify in a book I obtained on my trip. I will let my acquaintance tell the story, which I retold below in the first person.
My wife was on a trip during the Holodomor era (1932-1933), the man-made famine engineered by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet regime in Ukraine. The word “Holodomor” comes from two Ukrainian terms: holod, meaning “hunger,” and mor, meaning “extermination.”
The fourth Saturday of November is the official commemoration of the Holodomor, the catastrophic famine that resulted in the deaths of around four million Ukrainians.
The train my wife was riding slowed down near the train station, slow enough that it allowed a woman to toss an infant into the open door of the train.
And then my wife saw a young woman run by the window, obviously very distraught, crying profusely. A lady on the train, bewildered, picked up the infant, probably only a week or two old, wondering what to do with it.
My wife, who only two days earlier had delivered our first child, a boy, stillborn, said to the woman holding the child, “Let me have the baby. I can feed it.” The woman then passed the infant to my wife, and she began to breastfeed it.
My wife, a nurse, knew that a woman who delivered a stillborn baby can physically breastfeed another child the next day, although she will primarily be producing colostrum rather than mature breast milk.
Colostrum is a nutrient-rich fluid that a newborn can consume without problems. The female body’s hormonal transitions trigger lactation to begin immediately following the delivery of the placenta, regardless of whether the birth was a live birth or a stillbirth.
After the loss of our son, my wife felt the child was a gift from God. She then nursed it without problems. When the train my wife was on arrived in a Russian city near Moscow, we took the infant, a boy, to the doctor who was assigned to the American embassy staff where I worked.
The doctor reported from his examination that, aside from severe malnourishment, he was a healthy child displaying a beaming smile which charmed everybody.
With connections to the Russian State Department, we obtained a birth certificate that named me as the father and my wife as the mother. We named the child Dimitri, a common Russian name.
Dimitri was a pure joy, always smiling and rarely crying. When he did, we knew something was very wrong. When Dimitri was a year old, we moved back to America to our home in Texas, where Dimitri grew up bilingual. He learned English from me and Russian from his mother, who was born and lived in Russia until she married me.
When Dimitri was 18, we told him about his true parentage. He was very surprised and very curious about his birth mother, so we thought we would attempt to locate her.
We began with the village where he was passed onto the train that my wife was riding. When we arrived at the Russian town looking for his birth mother, several women looked at Dimitri, shaking their heads. “He is not my child,” they admitted. We knew he had a very distinct birthmark on his back, which was under his clothing.
Sure enough, one woman lifted his shirt, looked at his back and saw the mark, immediately recognizing Dimitri as her son.
Both she and we knew she was his birth mother. She then explained to us the reasons for her drastic behavior, which resulted in my wife accepting her son when she was on the train.
During the Holodomor atrocity, Dimitri’s birth mother explained, the Soviet government implemented forced grain requisitions, set impossible food quotas and seized most of the available provisions from Ukrainian peasants to fund the rapid industrialization of Russia and to export grain abroad to finance the war with Nazi Germany.
To prevent people from escaping the starvation zones, the Russian regime blockaded villages and banned peasants from traveling.
Rather than allow their children to die of starvation, desperate mothers would wait near railway tracks where trains slowed – often near stations or steep inclines – and slip their babies into open cargo doors or passenger windows.
Although a few children were rescued by strangers or placed into the overwhelmed state orphanages, many “railway children” did not survive due to the extent of the famine and the strict Soviet penalties for helping the starving population.
Historians estimate that between 3.5 and 7 million Ukrainians perished during the Holodomor holocaust, which is internationally recognized as an act of genocide aimed at crushing Ukrainian nationalism and their efforts to gain independence.
To bond the relationship between Dimitri and his birth mother, she moved to America and began a new life here. She was in her seventies then, but still had a lot of life left.
Dimitri often said he was blessed as few other humans by having two mothers, both of whom he loved dearly. When he married the nice American girl that he met in college, he was adamant that he would always live close to both mothers, which he does today, earning a living by translating documents from English to Russian and from Russian to English.
One reason he stayed where we lived was because he wanted his three children to know, and love, all three of their grandmothers.
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Dr. Bergman is a multi-award-winning professor and author. He has 9 degrees and has taught at both the graduate and undergraduate level for over 40 years. His over 2,100 publications are in both scholarly and popular journals. Dr. Bergman’s work has been translated into 15 languages. He has spoken over 2,000 times to college, university and church groups in America, Canada, Europe, the South Sea Islands, and Africa. He lives in Montpelier and is available to present in churches and schools. Jerry can be reached at jbergman1946@gmail.com. Bergman’s website is: https://crev.info/author/jbergman/