Turning the pages back...
August 14, 1983
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-1933, beginning on February 20, 1983, and continuing through February 26, 1984, The Ukrainian Weekly published a chronology of contemporaneous news reports about the Famine-Genocide as they appeared in Svoboda and, later, The Weekly, which began publication in October 1933. (These texts are available online on The Weekly's website, www.ukrweekly.com, in the section on the Great Famine under the heading "Chronology of the Famine Years.")
Below is a brief excerpt from the column of August 14, 1983, which covered news reported in August 1933.
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On August 19, Svoboda printed news from Lviv which stated that steps were being taken to organize aid for Ukrainians in Soviet-occupied territories. Efforts initiated in Lviv called on Ukrainians in western Ukraine, Europe and abroad to help their brothers in need. ... In Czechoslovakia, a Committee to Aid the Hungry in Ukraine, composed of representatives from 32 Ukrainian organizations, issued a communiqué to all Ukrainians.
News from Vienna also printed in Svoboda on August 19 stated that many foreign organizations were recruiting aid for Ukrainians living in the Soviet Union. An aid center, established in response to appeals by Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, was based in Vienna. Cardinal Theodore Innitzer was to head the committee; the Austrian Red Cross volunteered its help. ...
On August 24, the headline in Svoboda read: "Moscow Takes All Grain for Its Own Use." Prof. Menda [whom Soviet academians had invited to teach in Soviet Ukraine] added that all reports about the wealth of the Soviet Union which appeared in the Soviet press were lies. Typhoid and famine killed entire towns and villages, he told the press in Lviv. People, insane from hunger, cut up and ate their children, and it seemed that the people had lost all human emotion - they had turned into wild animals, he said. He added that along the streets one saw corpses that rotted away because there was no one to bury them. ...
Source: "The Great Famine," August 14, 1983, The Ukrainian Weekly.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 11, 2002, No. 32, Vol. LXX
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