UCCA President's Remarks Delivered at St. Patrick's Cathedral on November 19, 2011 to Commemorate the 78th Anniversary of Ukraine's Genocide of 1932-1933

23 листопада 2011

I would like to ask each of you to concentrate for a moment, and picture yourself as a child … a child whose day dreams should be filled with joy and laughter, but instead your only thought is of the gnawing hunger pain in your stomach that will not cease...Imagine seeing hostile armed units, forcefully entering your homestead in search of food and confiscating your family’s every last morsel - every grain of wheat, every kernel of corn, every chicken, every pig, every cow…. Envision watching members of your family, those closest and most dear to you,  slowly and painfully wasting away from hunger – wasting away to mere skin and bones in a slow and miserable death…imagine your  sorrow, your helplessness, your fear…

… Now picture your entire community decimated by hunger. Everywhere you look, your friends and neighbors beg for food. Others lay dying, or already dead in the streets, unburied, because there are few left with enough strength to bury them…..

It is hard to conceive these gruesome scenes, but thankfully we can return to the reality and comfort of our surroundings.

Yet for the few Holodomor survivors among us here today - such horrific scenes were not figments of their imagination, but, in fact for them in 1932-1933 such scenes were a frightening reality.

During that 1 year period, such horrors were played out on a daily basis in cities, towns and villages across the heart of a country that ironically, boasted some of the world’s most fertile soil, and was known as the Bread Basket of Europe.  And yet, at the height of the Holodomor, people were dying at the rate of 25,000 per day – or 1,000 per hour – or 17 per minute; one quarter of rural population was starved to death and of those millions who perished approximately 3 million of them were children.

Unfortunately these statistics and facts, about a starvation that reached a scale that surpasses human comprehension, are not the work of fiction…They were, in fact, the disturbing and gruesome reality for the people of Ukraine, during the Genocide of 1932-1933.

Today, 78 years later, we gather within these sacred walls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to honor the memory of millions of men, women and children -- all innocent casualties of a brutal war waged against humanity by the god-less Soviet regime. A regime that carefully devised a plan to wipe out the Ukrainian nation as a whole, and with it any hope of freedom. Targeting the peasantry who were the core, the foundation, the pillar of the nation, Stalin and his henchmen brutally used food as the ultimate weapon against the freedom-loving people of Ukraine. 

Through a meticulously orchestrated mass collectivization campaign, the totalitarian Soviet regime imposed unreachable grain quotas, confiscated all foodstuffs and even sealed Ukraine’s borders -- trapping Ukrainians... within their own bountiful country…with no food… and no chance of escape. 

This horrendous act of genocide against the Ukrainian people is known as the Holodomor – murder by starvation.

Recently declassified KBG documents reveal more horrifying aspects of the Holodomor, particularly that Stalin’s plan was to destroy Ukraine’s national consciousness and to quash the aspirations of the Ukrainian people, for freedom – thus eliminating a serious threat to the integrity of the Soviet empire.  As a communist leader speaking in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1934 stated, “"Famine in Ukraine was brought on to decrease the number of Ukrainians, replace the dead with people from other parts of the USSR, and thereby kill the slightest thought of any Ukrainian independence."

This unprecedented tragedy in Ukraine’s history is one that should never be forgotten – for to do so, would be a crime in itself. As Americans we are honor-bound to remember the millions who perished as a result of this deliberate act of genocide – and we must vow to do everything in our power to never allow such a tragedy to repeat itself... in any nation...under any circumstances.

To those who survived Ukraine’s Genocide, we thank the Lord for sparing your lives.

And to the innocent millions who needlessly perished and whose souls continue to cry out for justice, we say - May you rest in peace – Vichna yim pamyiat – you will never be forgotten.