UKRAINE’S FAMINE 1932-33

          
           In 1933, the Italian Consul in Kharkiv, then the capital of the Ukrainian SSR wrote:

        “A week ago, a special service was set up to protect children who have been abandoned. Along with the peasants who flock to the towns because there is no hope of survival in the countryside, there are also children who are simply brought here and abandoned by their parents, who then return to their village to die. Their hope is someone in their town will be able to look after their children…. So for a week now the town has been patrolled by “dworniki,” attendants in white uniforms who collect the children and take them to the nearest police station… around midnight they are all transported in trucks to the freight station at Severodonetsk. That’s where all the children who are found in stations and on trains, the peasant families, the old people and all the peasant  who have been picked up during the day are gathered together… A medical team does a sort of selection process… anyone who is not yet swollen up and still has a chance of survival is directed to Kholodnaya Khora buildings, where a constant population  of about 8,000 lies dying on straw beds… Most of them are children. People who are already starting to swell up are moved out in good trains and abandoned about forty mile out of town so that they can die out of sight.  When they arrive at their destination, huge ditches are dug, and the dead are carried out of the wagons.”

       This year we mark the 75^th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-33, referred to as the Holodomor, during which some 7-10 million innocent Ukrainians perished.  This great tragedy was genocide against the Ukrainian people perpetrated  by Stalin’s regime in Moscow. In 1988 the United States Congress Commission on the Ukraine Famine concluded:

        “The Genocide Convention defines genocide as one or more specified actions committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group wholly or partially as such…One or more of the actions specified in the Genocide Convention was taken against the Ukrainians in order to destroy a substantial part of the Ukrainian people…Overwhelming evidence indicates that Stalin was warned of impending famine in Ukraine and pressed for measures that could only ensure its occurrence and exacerbate its effects. Such policies not only came into conflict with his response to food supply difficulties elsewhere in the preceding year, but some of them were implemented with greater vigor in ethnically Ukrainian areas than elsewhere and were utilized in order to eliminate any manifestation of Ukrainian national self assertion.”

        We urge Ukrainians everywhere to honor the victims by organizing solemn requiem services, processions, exhibits and conferences. We look to our neighbors in the world community of nations to recognize our pain and offer solace by passing parliamentary resolutions and denouncing at international fora, the Holodomor as Genocide against the Ukrainian nation. We pray to God to protect us all from evil and grant us peace.   

Toronto-New York                                                                                                                                            October 21, 2007

For the Ukrainian World Congress

                   President                                                    Chair Coordinating Committee                                       General Secretary