The year 1933 in the Western mind is associated with the dark days of the Great Depression and

its hardships. But for Ukrainians the world over the year 1933 reminds them of the horrors of the Holodomor. Holodomor is made up of two Ukrainian words Holod which means hunger and Mor which means death. Holodomor literally means death by famine. So exactly what happened 75 years ago? The facts are pretty much agreed on. Ukraine's border's were sealed and Stalin and the Communist Party of Ukraine turned the entire country into one big concentration camp. On the Russian side of the border there was food. On the Ukrainian side people starved. Those that sought to escape were shot. Eye witnesses who travelled into Ukraine described a barren land with no people in sight for miles and miles. Entire villages and towns were empty. At the height of the Holodomor up to 25,000 people were dying daily. Recently there has been increasing recognition that the 1933 Holodomor in Ukraine was a genocide. According to the United Nations 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, genocide is defined as any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic or religious group, such as deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. This definition requires two element to be present for genocide to occur. The actus reus or physical act and the mens rea or mental intention. There are two leading scholars who present authoritative arguments that the Holodomor amounted to genocide. The first was Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer from Lviv, who lived there while it was under Poland. As the internationally recognized father of the U.N. Convention and someone who was raised on Ukrainian lands he should know. Lemkin argues that there was a genocide in Ukraine because the Kremlin first liquidated the intelligentsia who were the brain of the Ukrainian nation, then liquidated the Ukrainian clergy who were the spirit of the nation, then liquidated the peasants who were the retainers of the culture, traditions and language of the nation and finally colonized the country with Russians while deporting Ukrainians in order to Russify the country and thereby erase the Ukrainian nation off the face of the earth. The second was Sanislaw Kulchytsky Ukraine's leading historian on the Holodomor. His analysis is that in 1933 after Stalin set impossibly high goals for grain production soldiers entered the villages and requisitioned all grains to the point where even seed grain for future harvests was confiscated. Then, after all that grain was seized soldiers began

confiscating feedstock and even livestock leaving peasants behind with nothing to eat and no place to go. That moment, according to Kulchytsky, amounted to a genocide. While the world was at least aware of most other genocides, this was not true of the Holodomor for the last 75 years. Why wasn't the world aware of the Holodomor? How could the world be aware when internally anyone who dared to speak publicly about the genocide was arrested, shot, imprisoned or exiled? I remember a visit I made to Ukraine in 1974, long after Stalin had died but while the Soviet Union still existed. I met Ivanka Markovska in Lviv. To talk about such things as the Great Famine Ivanka took me into an isolated filed, cupped her hand over my ear and whispered her life story to me. She told me that she attributed her survival to one thing, and then she motioned as if she was closing a zipper across her mouth. I am certain many of you gathered here today heard similar stories from your relatives and friends in Ukraine. How could the world be aware when externally the Soviet Union denied there was famine in Ukraine and exported grains badly needed in Ukraine to the West for sale. How could the world know when Walter Duranty, a New York Times reported knowingly falsely reported that there was no famine in Ukraine. How could the world know when, with the outbreak of World War II, the inconvenient truth of Stalin's crimes were pushed aside by the allies to gain his support in prosecuting the war against Adolph Hitler. It was not in the interests of Western leaders to raise uncomfortable questions with Stalin in Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. After all wasn't Hitler, and not Stalin, our real enemy? Meanwhile, millions of Ukrainians starved. Most people have heard of the rule against hearsay. This rule bars statements made out of court from being introduced into evidence to prove the truth of what is being asserted on the grounds that the person who makes the statement should be open to being cross examined on it. There is an exception for statements made against interest where the party making the statement is speaking about something that is not to their advantage since in those instances the courts hold that the statements made are more credible. Two statements against interest are specially relevant in the case of the Holodomor. In the first, in a conversation Churchill had with Stalin in August 1942 Stalin was asked if the stresses of the war were as bad to him as carrying out the policy of collectivization of the farms. "Oh, no" Stalin said, "the Collective farm policy was a terrible struggle..."Ten millions," he said, while holding up his hands. He went on to say that apart from a small minority that were exiled, the vast majority perished. In the second conversation Walter Duranty was quoted by a 1933 British Embassy dispatch as saying that "as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly for the lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year."

I find it hard to relate to the notion of 10 million deaths. SO to try to get a sense of it I thought about the one death I personally witnessed, the death of my mother a few years ago. Anyone who has been present at the death of a friend or loved one will be able to relate. The moment of a person's death is a moment of truth. They say it is a great honor to be present at such a moment. Mother Teresa know how important those moments are and dedicated her life to be with the dying. There is something profound about the moment of death. It leads you to think deeply about the meaning of life and about your existence. But how can you relate that to the death of 10 million? 10 million is the total population of the Western Canadian provinces. Imagine all those people dying in one year without the world even noticing. So what are the lessons to be learned from the Holodomor? For one thing, like the Jews who see Israel as their guarantee that they will not again fall victim to the Holocaust, Ukrainians need to see the new Ukrainian state as their guarantee that they will not fall victim to another Holodomor. Since Stalin and the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union targeted the Ukrainian nation because it was Ukrainian those who survived the Holodomor, and those who were beyond the reach of Stalin should now be the best Ukrainians they can be to cherish their language and culture, to be astute about politics and history, take be active in the Ukrainian community and in their churches. Since we believe in Judeo-Christian values we believe that we are all descended from Adam and Eve and, therefore, that we are all part of the human family. We should therefore care about genocide wherever it takes place: Darfur, Rwanda, Cambodia, China, Armenia or the Holocaust. We need to promote genocide awareness and genocide resistance. Since there are states like Russia that continue to deny the Holodomor was a genocide. Recently for example Prime Minister Medvedev declined an invitation from President Yuschenko to join in the commemoration ceremonies being held in Kyiv contending that the Holodomor was a politically motivated campaign to advance the nationalist agenda. For this reason we need to promote the truth of the Holodomor and to argue that those who deny the Holodomor do so because they are motivated by a political agenda to destabilize the Ukrainian state. Further, since there are institutions like the New York Times who refuse to purge themselves of their complicity in denying the existence of famine in Ukraine in 1933 and stand by their correspondent Walter Duranty for his work and his Pulitzer prize for his articles from the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it is important that the truth about the Holodomor be taught in schools and shared with the media.

It is important for us to learn the history of our own families and people, to appreciate the sacrifices that have been made so we can lead better lives here and elsewhere in a freer world. Let me conclude by saying that we know from the survivors of the Holodomor that the greatest fear of those who perished 75 years ago was that the world would never know how and why they died and would never care. By holding events like this one here today, and others elsewhere, today and in the future, we can guarantee that fear will never become a reality.