Holodomor Stories

By Volodymyr Kish

Over the past month, the Ukrainian community here in Canada has been pre-occupied with publicizing the anniversary of the Ukrainian Genocide known as the Holodomor and preparing for the annual commemoration events which took place this past weekend.

I think we can all be proud of the fact that there are now few Canadians that do not know about the Holodomor and the magnitude of the tragedy that was so mercilessly inflicted on the Ukrainian people back in 1932–33. Over the past decade especially, the Ukrainian community and its umbrella organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, have mounted an effective educational and media campaign aimed at ensuring that not just Ukrainians, but all people become aware of the devastation that Stalin and his henchman inflicted on the Ukrainian nation, one that cost it the lives of some seven to ten million of its inhabitants.

Over the past week or two, I have seen many articles in the major national and metropolitan newspapers on the Holodomor. There have been many stories on the national TV networks, on the radio and on the Internet. The Holodomor is now being taught as part of the curriculum of numerous major school boards throughout the country, including Toronto, as well as Durham Region where I reside. Special statements on the Holodomor have been issued in the Federal Parliament and in provincial legislatures, as well as by numerous politicians, cabinet ministers and even Prime Minister Harper. The essential facts of this genocide are now well known and accepted not only in Canada but throughout the world.

The question now becomes – what next? While it is true that the Holodomor has now gained some of the recognition it deserves, the battle is not yet over. There are reactionary forces in not only Russia but in Ukraine itself that still seek to deny, minimize or distort the extent of what happened. The Ukrainian community cannot rest on its laurels and relax its efforts towards this cause.

What we must now try and do is focus on more creative ways of enhancing people’s understanding of this great tragedy. In this regard, Professor Alexander Motyl of Rutgers University, the invited guest speaker at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture held a few weeks ago, pointed out one particularly effective way of doing this. Essentially, he emphasized the importance of the personal narratives or stories of people that lived during that time and were witnesses to the events that took place. As he stated, there can be no Ukrainian history without the voices of real Ukrainians, living real lives and dying real deaths being heard. History needs to be personal to have any kind of impact on the average person.

I would agree wholeheartedly with his prescription. The statistics of the Holodomor are undoubtedly mind boggling and difficult to comprehend – how does one relate to numbers like seven or ten million people dying of hunger? Statistics do have some impact but they tend to be abstract concepts and only tell part of the story.

When we think of the Jewish Holocaust during the Second World War, what has made the greatest impact – the exact number of innocent Jews that were killed by the Nazis, or the poignant story of a young Jewish girl by the name of Anne Frank. What stirs people’s emotions more – the accounts of the many thousands of nameless and fanatical Nazis that wreaked havoc on the countless Jews, Gypsies and Slavs of Europe, or the drama of the trial, conviction and execution of one Adolf Eichmann. We may be able to relate intellectually to statistics and historical details, but it is only when we stare personally at the face of a victim such as Anne Frank, or at the evil personified by someone like Adolf Eichmann that our emotions are truly stirred and we can comprehend the essence of the tragedy on a truly human level.

There were countless Ukrainian Anne Franks, and thousands of Communist versions of Adolf Eichmann, and it is those stories that we must find and publish to the world. It is only then that the Holodomor will move in most people’s minds from being an abstract historical event to one that people can truly feel the reality and pain, and appreciate it for the evil that it was.