By Ashley Joannou,
Red Deer Advocate, May 2, 2008
Seventy-five years after a man-made famine killed between seven and 10 million Ukrainians, a flame honouring their memory arrived in Red Deer on Friday morning (May 2).
The famine, known as the Holodomor, took place between 1932 and 1933. Survivor Stefan Horlatsch has been travelling with the torch on every Canadian leg of its worldwide journey, which will eventually cover 33 countries. Horlatsch was 12 when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin closed Ukraine’s borders and confiscated all food from the people. “He didn’t want them to fight for independence,” Horlatsch said.
Among the millions killed were Horlatsch’s cousins. The family of 11 all starved to death. “With this flame we are passing the memory of what happened on to the younger generation,” Horlatsch told a crowd of about 150 social studies students at Notre Dame High School on Friday. “To try to prevent something like this from happening again.”
The Toronto man told students how officials would prevent people from getting food. “They would tear down the walls of your house or dig up your gardens looking for hidden food,” he said.
Horlatsch told the students about going to visit his cousins one afternoon. “I remember one day I was at that house and I saw three dead bodies,” he said. “No one could bring themselves to bury them in the harsh winter.” Horlatsch credits his mother’s faith and the bags of bread crumbs she hid, with keeping him and his siblings alive. “We would get two spoonfuls of bread crumbs with water and it kept us alive,” he said.
By January 1933, Horlatsch was too weak from hunger to go to school. When he returned the next year, a third of his class had died.
Grade 12 student Robyn Holitski said she was not aware of the famine before Friday’s presentation. “I’m surprised more people don’t know, it sounds like something that should be part of our textbooks somewhere.”
Her classmate Natalie Leclair was most surprised by the number of people who died. “To have 10 million people die in 17 months is shocking,” she said.
Following the presentation, members of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress passed around a petition asking the Canadian government to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide.
“So many people died, we want people to know about it and recognize it,” Horlatsch said.