Travelling exhibit raises awareness about Holodomor's horrors

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This article was published 20/10/2016 (1262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So many dead, so little awareness.

Speaker after speaker on the legislature grounds Thursday morning lamented just how little knowledge so many Canadians still have of the Soviet Union's deliberate starving of millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.

The Holodomor National Awareness Tour's mobile classroom aims to rectify that lack of awareness for thousands of Manitoba children over the next two weeks.

"It is not well-known with the general Canadian public — it was denied and covered up by the USSR," Bob Onyschuk, chair of the Holodomor tour, told the ceremony at the legislature.

Survivor Sonia Kushliak said every one who survived was just a child during the Holodomor and remembers what their parents and grandparents sacrificed to keep them alive.

Education Minister Ian Wishart said a photograph of a starving girl amid a Ukrainian wheat field on the side of the mobile classroom depicts the reality of the genocide.

The wheelchair-accessible classroom features 12 high-resolution screens, with seating for 33 people, and facilitators to explain the exhibits. It will be at the legislature until 6 p.m. Thursday before touring schools for the next two weeks.

"We need to continue to educate all Manitobans about the Ukrainian famine and genocide," Wishart said. He said it is difficult to imagine Manitoba without its Ukrainian community.

Manitoba, Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Quebec have recognized the Holodomor as a genocide.

"There are provinces today that have refused to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide," Oksana Bondarchuk, president of the Manitoba provincial council of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, told the ceremony.

Bondarchuk said survivors stayed silent for many years, "so tortured were their memories, so fearful were they of the Soviet Union's long reach."

More information is available from https://holodomortour.ca.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca