Even Mr. Khodakovsky, whose aunt’s remains were later found in a well, has trouble accepting that line in its entirety. “It was terrible,” he said of the famine, and not at all unavoidable. Rather, he said, it was the result of Stalinist policies, particularly the sale of grain to finance industrialization.

Ukraine’s 20th-century history is steeped in blood. After the famine, the country took the brunt of Stalinist-era repression and the violence of the eastern front in World War II, when upward of five million Ukrainian civilians died. In the current civil war, aside from the control of territory, nothing has been so fought over as this history.

Natalia S. Skrichenko, a history teacher, has been watching that process unfold all around her. Soon after the separatists took over, Ms. Skrichenko and other history teachers in separatist-held areas of eastern Ukraine were told to throw their existing Ukrainian history texts into the trash.

For months, teachers improvised until the separatist Ministry of Education came out this year with new mimeographed guidelines, called “Materials for the Questions of History Teaching,” for use in the second semester this year — literally rewriting history midway through the school year.

“History doesn’t change,” Ms. Skrichenko said philosophically about the new curriculum for students in rebel-held portions of Ukraine. “People just look at the facts with a new mentality. We don’t really know what happened in the past. It’s gone. All we can know is what we see through the prism of our own time.”