my dad's family were farmers in Poltava. The Bolsheviks took their farm from them and the country starved. My dad, then eldest son in the family said- if the Russians have taken the food to Moscow, we will go to Moscow rather than die here, and they did. He married a Muscovite. They were sent to a Siberian Gulag where she was tortured and murdered. He and only one other brother out of eight, came back. He was killed during the Soviet by a Russian tank commander who had raped his young daughter. The father, in a fury, went to have it out with him. Only their mother was left. My dad was in the Ukrainian National Guard and taken prisoner by the Germans, at the end of the war they were told, bullet or Monte Casino. They didn't even give them guns for protection. He was POW of the Scots Guard and worked on a farm there. The English needed workers and asked for POW's to be sent to England, where he married my mum. My dad became famous in the Ukrainian world diaspora as a freelance journalist, satirist. He often talked and cried if he had a bit of vodka in him, about his first wife and sent money to her family, told us of how in Moscow they were starving in one room, but they had each other. I went to look and sure enough, the Russians were knocking everything down like kids with lego, but on the edge of a building site, I found it.. a sunflower, standing alone as it had done so long ago.