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Ukraine commemorates victims of Soviet-era famine

"People ate people, mothers ate their own children. They didn't realize what they were doing, they just were hungry."

Olena Tuz, a Ukrainian who was 6 years old during the famine

Olena Tuz was a 6-year-old girl when she saw a neighbor throwing the body of a naked woman into a hole on the edge of a remote forest in 1932. Flesh had been cut off the body.

"People ate people, mothers ate their own children. They didn't realize what they were doing, they just were hungry," said Tuz, standing on the side of a thousand-strong rally in the capital Kiev to commemorate victims of the Soviet-era forced famine that killed up to 10 million Ukrainians.

People from various Ukraine's regions gathered near the St. Michael Cathedral, some with candles, some with wheat ears or red carnation. The crowd was awash with yellow-and-blue national flags with black ribbons. Church bells rang droningly. Many cried.

"My 11-year-old sister came to a forester's lodge to ask some water; she was allowed in, then the forester locked the door and took a knife to kill her, but she warned that she was a teacher's daughter, and he got scared and didn't eat her," Tuz said.

Her family was well-known and highly respected in her village in the western Zhytomir region.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin provoked what the Ukrainians called the Great Famine in 1932-1933 as part of his campaign to force Ukrainian peasants to give up their land and join collective farms. During the height of the famine that was enforced by methodical confiscation of all food by the Soviet secret police, cases of cannibalism were widespread as people grew desperate to survive.

Those who resisted the confiscation were arrested and sent to Siberia; a person taking a wheat ear from a field was to shot on the spot.

On Saturday, relatives and survivors lit 33,000 candles in Kiev -- representing the number of people who were dying daily at the famine's height.

Earlier in the day, Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko and state officials planted some 300 snowball trees in Kiev's park on the Dnipro river hills at the site of the memorial-to-be to the Great Famine victims.

"Everyone should know the truth about this tragedy," Yushchenko told the crowd near the St.Michael Cathedral. "The state system that made possible such crimes should be punished by the court of history."

The Great Famine was kept secret by the Soviet authorities. Only in 2003, Ukraine declassified more than 1,000 files documenting it.

On Friday, Yushchenko called on the international community to recognize the famine as genocide.

"I was too young and don't remember, but my mother told me later that they ate grass, nettle, potato peelings; trees had no leaves where a human hand could reach," said Dmytro Dumenchuk from the village of Banyliv in the western Chernivtsi region, who came to Kiev to commemorate famine victims.
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