Prince Albert Ukrainians prepare to mark Holodomor with Saturday prayer service and educational program

Saskatchewan’s Holodomor Monument sits on the grounds of the Wascana Centre in Regina. Holodomor Memorial Day events are scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 23. --Photo from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress—Saskatchewan Provincial Council Facebook page.

Uko Akpanuko

Daily Herald

Prince Albert residents of Ukrainian descent will mark the Holodomor Memorial Day on Saturday with a ceremony and program at St George’s Ukrainian Catholic Church.

The event will start off with an evening prayer at 6:30 p.m. It will also include the observance of two minutes of silence for the departed.

The Holodomor Memorial Day is set aside to remember the millions of Ukrainians who died as a result of starvation from man-made famine caused by policies enacted by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. 

“It’s an often forgotten genocide that took place and I think we as a society need to learn about the genocides that took place in the 20th century. That’s just one of them. Everybody knows about the holocaust, well this is the Ukrainian Holocaust,” said Dennis Ogorodnick, a member of the Veselka Ukrainian Heritage Club. “I always say I’m a proud Canadian with Ukrainian and Polish roots, and so I’m making people aware of this tragedy that took place in 1932-33.”

After the prayer, at the Parish Hall, there will be some music and presentation of Ukrainian poetry at the Parish Hall. The event will also include a lecture that will examine why the famine happened, how it happened, and the aftermath. The two minutes of silence will be held at 7:32 p.m. at the request of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

Ogrodnick will be one of the key speakers at the Holodomor remembrance event. He always taught about Holodomor when he was teaching high school. He plans to draw on those teaching experiences for his talk on Saturday.

He said people are becoming more aware of Holodomor because of education campaigns. However, he said many of the details are still shocking.

“The horror of what happened at the height of this genocide, it’s horrific,” Ogrodnick said. “People were so desperate in January of 1933, and hungry, that they ate everything in sight. The government had taken away everything, all their food. They were farmers, and (the government) took it all away, the grain and everything. People were dying and people resorted to cannibalism to survive. That’s the part that shocks me the most. This is what happened in Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian famine was part of a larger famine that hit Soviet grain growing regions from 1931 to 1934. However, the Soviet government made the famine worse through a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).

By early 2019, 16 countries as well as the Vatican had recognized the Holodomor as a genocide, and both houses of the United States Congress had passed resolutions declaring that “Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against the Ukrainians in 1932–1933.”

International Holodomor Day is recognized on the fourth Saturday of November and, this year, falls on November 23, 2024.

–with files from Jason Kerr/Daily Herald

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