We all know about the Holocaust.

Six million Jews were systematically murdered by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and its collaborators in one of history’s most horrific campaigns of extermination.

It is a number seared into the conscience of humanity. And for ghood reason. Sear too how many have died in Chinese and African “holocausts.”

But how many know about the millions who perished in Ukraine under Soviet Communism?

How many know about the villages emptied, the children starved, the priests imprisoned, the farmers executed or deported, and the families destroyed in the name of an atheistic political ideology?

It was in our books Witness (by Josyp Terelya), but we weren’t able to details all the stats and those numbers are almost incomprehensible.

The most notorious catastrophe was the Holodomor, the great Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, during the reign of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

It was a famine made catastrophic by government policy.

As peasants starved, Soviet authorities confiscated grain and other foodstuffs, punished those who attempted to obtain food, and restricted the movement of desperate villagers.

Entire families died.

Children collapsed from hunger. Parents watched helplessly as their sons and daughters wasted away. Villages that had once been filled with life became places of silence and death.

And the world, for the most part, scarcely knew what was happening.

According to a major demographic study associated with Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, approximately 3.9 million people died as a direct consequence of the Holodomor.

But that is far from the highest estimate.

Some Ukrainian researchers and historians have argued for figures of seven million to ten million.

A particularly controversial estimate placed the number at 10.5 million Ukrainian victims, including those outside Soviet Ukraine.

That would exceed the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

There is, however, an important qualification: the 10.5-million estimate is not accepted by most demographic specialists, and Ukraine’s own National Holodomor Museum subsequently stated that it had not been scientifically substantiated.

The better-established figure remains approximately 3.9 million deaths from the 1932–1933 famine alone.

And yet even that number is staggering.

Nearly four million human beings.

In approximately two years.

But the famine was not the beginning or the end of Soviet repression.

There had been another catastrophic famine in 1921–1923. There were Stalin’s political purges, including mass executions during the Great Terror of 1937–1938. There were deportations, prisons, labor camps, and the suppression of Ukrainian religious and cultural life.

Then came another devastating famine in 1946–1947.

The cumulative number of Ukrainians who died because of Soviet repression and disastrous state policies across the decades remains uncertain, but it reaches into the millions beyond any reasonable doubt.

What makes this history especially chilling is that so much of the suffering took place in a society where the state sought to subordinate religion to Communist ideology.

Churches were closed or destroyed. Clergy were imprisoned. Religious communities were driven underground. In 1946, the Soviet authorities orchestrated the suppression of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, forcing its faithful and clergy into an officially imposed religious structure or clandestine worship.

The attack was not merely against political opponents.

It was also against independent institutions, religious allegiance, family traditions, and the spiritual foundations of society.

There are important differences between the Holocaust and the Holodomor.

The Nazi Holocaust was an explicitly racial genocide directed toward the extermination of the Jewish people. The Ukrainian famine arose in the context of forced collectivization, grain seizures, political repression, and Stalin’s policies toward Ukraine. Historians continue to debate aspects of Soviet intent and the precise scope of the famine’s genocidal character.

These distinctions matter.

The suffering of one people should never be used to diminish that of another.

But neither should the magnitude of Nazi crimes cause us to overlook those committed under Communism.

In both cases, enormous state power was turned against vulnerable human beings. People were reduced to categories, obstacles, or enemies. Millions were deprived of the most basic right: the right to live.

The Jewish Holocaust has rightly become an enduring warning to civilization.

The suffering of Ukraine deserves to be remembered with comparable seriousness—not because the two histories are identical, but because every innocent life is of immeasurable value.

For Christians, there is another lesson.

When human beings cease to recognize the sacred dignity of others, when ideology replaces conscience, and when the state claims an authority above moral law, the consequences can be catastrophic.

A starving Ukrainian child was no less precious in the eyes of God than a Jewish child murdered at Auschwitz.

Both were made in His image.

Both had names, families, hopes, and souls.

And both should haunt the conscience of humanity.

The figures may be debated.

The historical circumstances may differ.

But millions upon millions of innocent lives were lost.

And history demands that we remember them.

May the Lord grant eternal rest to all who suffered and died under these terrible regimes.