The Quiet That Remains
Survival, Silence and the Story of a Ukrainian FamilyA ground-level history of Ukraine across the twentieth century, told through one family’s records and voices. From the last days of the Cossack Hetmanate to the Holodomor, Nazi occupation, and Cold War exile in Britain, the book follows how identity survived through ritual, memory, and quiet persistence.
About the book
The Quiet That Remains is a true, document-led history of Ukraine’s twentieth century, told through the lives of one family from Poltava. Drawing on parish registers, Soviet files, photographs, and private papers, it follows the Skliars through revolution, famine, occupation, and exile, tracing how meaning survived when speech became dangerous.
The story moves from the end of the Cossack Hetmanate to Stalin’s terror, the Holodomor, wartime occupation, displaced persons camps, and post-war life in Britain. It shows how faith, language, and the habits of memory carried identity when official history demanded forgetting. Rigorous yet lyrical, the book is history told from below, pieced from fragments that empire could not erase.
Highlights
- Ukraine’s century seen through one family’s records and silences
- Silence as both refuge and loss across generations
- Archival reconstruction that restores voices history tried to remove
Excerpt
Read a free sample on Kindle: Look Inside.
Edition details
- Title: The Quiet That Remains
- Subtitle: Survival, Silence and the Story of a Ukrainian Family
- Author: Ben Skliar-Ward
- Publisher: Otter Stream Press
- Publication year: 2025
- Language: English
- ISBN: 1068268808
About the author
Ben Skliar-Ward is a writer and historian based in the UK. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford and works in financial regulation. The Quiet That Remains is his first book, a study of survival, silence, and the endurance of meaning across generations.
More at skliar-ward.com.