EDITORIAL: A remembrance and a memorial (10/31/99)

EDITORIAL

A remembrance and a memorial

Last year our community and Ukrainians around the world marked the 65th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine, which killed at least 7 million of our brothers and sisters. The Famine was not a natural disaster, but an atrocity orchestrated by Stalin and his henchmen to destroy a nation using the most heinous of methods: food as a weapon. Major commemorations of this tragic anniversary were held in Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg in Canada, and in Washington, Chicago and New York in the United States, as well as in other cities. There were observances also in Ukraine, where President Leonid Kuchma issued a decree proclaiming a National Day of Remembrance of Famine Victims.

More than 4,500 Ukrainian Americans of metropolitan New York last year commemorated the anniversary of the Great Famine with a requiem service at St. Patrick's Cathedral on November 8, which was designated as "Ukrainian Famine Day of Remembrance" throughout the United States. This year, the Great Famine is to be remembered on November 20 with a solemn procession from the Ukrainian section of Lower Manhattan to St. Patrick's, where a memorial service is to be jointly offered by hierarchs of the Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches.

Some have asked: Why is the Ukrainian American community marking the 66th anniversary of the Great Famine (since it is not a "big anniversary" - a "kruhla richnytsia") and planning to march in a solemn procession on the streets of Manhattan? The immediate answer is to focus attention on the most glaringly ignored genocide of the century now coming to an end. While others may look ahead to the next century, we Ukrainians must remember that the 20th century was one of the worst for the Ukrainian nation.

Volodymyr Kurylo, who chairs the Civic Committee to Remember Victims of the Famine in Ukraine (organized to plan the solemn procession), notes: "In this age of apologies, when many are offering century-ending apologies for wrongs committed during the 20th century, the most glaring omission is the Famine of 1932-1933."

Indeed, even today there are Famine-deniers, insidious and perfidious, who continue to spread Stalin-era propaganda that there was no famine, that if some people died of hunger that was the price that had to be paid for "modernization" of the USSR, that the famine is a fiction created by Ukrainian nationalist fascist sympathizers hell-bent on defaming the Soviet system.

Can we ignore such lies? Can we allow them to be unchallenged?

Or, as Mr. Kurylo asks: "Can we greet the new millennium with a clear conscience if we have not memorialized once more the victims of the Famine, if we have not illuminated the darkness of the 20th century with the truth about this genocide carried out on Stalin's command?"

Last year, at a memorial program at Kyiv National Philharmonic Hall, Vice Prime Minister Valerii Smolii observed: "Ukrainians abroad consistently rang the bell. ... They put together titanic efforts so that all would realize: the Famine of 1933 stands on the level of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the Jewish Holocaust."

Today we still need to tell the world about our nation's greatest tragedy. Perhaps we also need to commemorate the Great Famine as much for ourselves, so that we collectively can remember and mourn the innocents of 1932-1933. Vichna yim pamiat.

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