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That This Horror Will Not Be Forgotten
A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE AND MOURNING FOR 7 MILLION
VICTIMS OF MURDER BY STARVATION
To Their Eternal Memory, To Moscow's Eternal Shame
We Invite All Our Friends to Join Us In
A COMMEMORATIVE MANIFESTATION
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of a planned and deliberately created
famine in Ukraine. It was the great famine during which over 7 million
Ukrainian men, women and children died from slow starvation. This horror
was carried out in the aftermath of a political struggle between the people
of
Ukraine and Soviet Russian government intent on eliminating the last traces
of
resistance which by 1932 was almost non-existent.
In the beginning, a genocidal attack was initiated on Ukrainian
intellectuals, professionals, defiant workers, and the church. Then
authorities
in Moscow had to contend with the millions of small farmers whose only
"crimes" were simple traditions of hard work, self-sufficiency, family,
church
and feelings of national consciousness.
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(Click on images to enlarge them)
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Threatened by their conservative and independent nature, the Kremlin
waged a ruthless war on these small people, not to subdue alleged
resistance, but to eliminate them altogether.
Historians estimate, that as a direct result of mass deportation, executions
and this genocidal famine, Ukraine lost from 11 million to 15 million people
during a period of time from 1929 to 1939. Journalists, eye-witnesses and
survivors provide many gruesome accounts of the desperate conditions
they observed as farming came to a complete stop. All the existing crops
were confiscated by Soviet authorities.
The already collectivized farmers were assessed harvest quotas, which were
impossible to meet. Special armed brigades were authorized to enter homes,
to pillage, to confiscate every morsel of food and to wantonly destroy what
could not be carried away.
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Travel was restricted, censorship imposed, and an entire nation began to
die; swollen from hunger, on streets, on country roads, in fields, in homes,
by the thousands, and hundreds of thousands, and millions, in one of the
most bountiful countries in the world.
One eye-witness called it "a war for bread, perhaps the most gruesome war
ever fought" where the only weapon left was passive resistance. It was a
time when weather conditions were favourable, and crops were uniformly
bountiful, when Ukraine was a rich and fertile land, one of the world's
great wheat producing areas. This was a country, which, in a matter of
months, was reduced to a "melancholy wasteland."
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This genocide occurred fifty years ago. Borders and people have shifted
and changed, but the Government responsible remains the same. In spite
of the devastation of the past, there are many signs today, that Ukrainian
people of strength, courage and spirituality have survived, even in a
godless society.
Now, fifty years later, we remember not so much in bitterness or sorrow,
as in grim and determined awareness that such an atrocity must never be
allowed to happen again. This special day of remembrance, to which
everyone is invited, will commemorate not only this great tragedy, but
all other tragic struggles, all other holocausts against innocent people,
and every single act of man's inhumanity towards man, carried out in the
name of political ideology.
This commemorative day is planned in the hope that it will strengthen
and firm our resolve that such horrors will not, and cannot happen again.
Join us for a commemorative manifestation Sunday, October 9th, 1983,
beginning with a processional gathering at the corner of Kennedy Street
and Ellice Avenue at 1:00 p.m. Next, an organized procession down
Memorial Boulevard, laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph and a memorial
service at the Legislative Buildings at 2:15 p.m. Proclamations, greetings
from dignitaries and speakers will follow.
Material researched, edited and posted from printed material sponsored
and published by the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, Winnipeg Branch,
in 1953 by the www.ArtUkraine.com Information Service (ARTUIS).
Material can be used but only with proper credits to the Ukrainian
Canadian Committee and to www.ArtUkraine.com Information Service
(ARTUIS).
The text above was taken from a full-page advertisement that appeared
in The Winnipeg Sun, Monday, October 3, 1983. We thank Orysia Tracz
of Winnipeg for providing the historial materials
to ARTUIS. FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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