Film screening, memorial concert reflect Ukraine's suffering (11/30/03)

THE 70th ANNIVERSARY OF THE FAMINE-GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE

Film screening, memorial concert reflect Ukraine's suffering

by Helen Smindak

NEW YORK - Two outstanding events of "Famine Remembrance Week," held on separate days at the United Nations complex, mirrored the horrific images of life and death in Ukraine in the 1930s and the sorrowful grieving for seven million lost souls that has followed since then, just as the loss of a loved one is followed by a funeral dirge.

On Wednesday evening, the award-winning documentary film "Harvest of Despair" was screened at the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium, portraying the bleak life of peasants in eastern Ukraine who defied Stalin's collectivization edicts. A memorial concert which took place Friday evening in the Poseidon area of the U.N. Visitors' Lobby, centering on a presentation of Ukrainian sacred music by the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka, concluded with a poignant rendering of Lysenko's solemn prayer "Vladyko, Neba i Zemli."

"Harvest of Despair," premiered in Toronto in 1984, employs rare archival footage to depict the man-made famine that ravaged Ukraine in the early 1930s. Millions of Ukrainians, almost one-quarter of Ukraine's population, died of starvation - at the rate of 25,000 a day - as the result of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's ruthless decree to stop the Ukrainian nation's struggle for political and cultural autonomy in the 1920s and 1930s.

The unforgettable story of a lost generation is told through haunting images of gaunt people with sunken eyes begging for bread or searching for grains of wheat, of children with swollen bellies and emaciated bodies, of piles of frozen corpses lying in a field.

Petro Grigorenko, a former Soviet general, the British journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge and Andor Hencke, then German consul in Kyiv, are among survivors who relate the horror of events in Ukraine. There is moving testimony by eyewitnesses, among them Lyubov Drashevska of New York, who describe scenes of death and devastation. Witnesses speak of seeing people eating leaves, dogs and corpses.

Emphasizing the deliberate manner in which the famine was engineered and then concealed, "Harvest of Despair" explores the roles played in the coverup by French Premier Edouard Herriot, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent of The New York Times.

Ukraine's permanent representative to the United Nations, Valeriy Kuchinsky, stated that "Harvest of Despair" is "a powerful film that provides insights into one of the most vicious genocides of the last century."

Mr. Kuchinsky said the Ukrainian community hoped to draw the attention of the world public to the flagrant violations of human rights so that these crimes could never be repeated.

Before the film showing, Dr. James E. Mace, former staff director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, told the audience that the film was a testimony not only of the loss to the Ukrainian people but of the loss to humanity as a whole. Dr. Mace, who currently teaches politics at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, has devoted his career to the study of Soviet policies in Ukraine.

"As you look at this film, I would like you to realize that we're not only talking about genocide, but the collective suffering of a nation, of a people and, by extension, the collective suffering of humanity, which has lost the contributions that could have been made by the creative figures of the 1920s - people like Mykola Khvyliovy, historians who were thinking of new ways of understanding the Ukrainian past, artists like Boychuk, for example, who were exploring new ways of artistic expression," he pointed out.

"Harvest of Despair," a 55-minute color film, was directed by Slavko Nowytski and produced by Mr. Nowytski and Yuriy Luhovy under the sponsorship of the Ukrainian Famine Research Committee of Canada, with the assistance of the National Film Board of Canada.

A musical homage

Solemn evening vespers and an excerpt from the liturgy, both arranged by Kyrylo Stetsenko, set the tone for the reverential presentations offered by the Dumka Chorus under the direction of Vasyl Hrechynsky.

Stetsenko's "Bless the Lord, O My Soul" and his arrangement of "The Lord's Prayer" were included in the program, along with Yatskevych's "Hail Mary" and Lysenko's "Cherubic Hymn" and his hymn "Your Presence is Everywhere, O Lord." Soloists for the hymn were Eugenia Babenko-Klufas, Larysa Bulyha and Mykhailo Moczula.

The concert reached its zenith with two heart-rending Bortniansky works - a slow, stately "Let My Prayer Reach You, O Lord" and the triumphant work "O Lord, In Your Strength The King Rejoices" from his Concerto No. 3. Solo portions in the second piece were performed by Ms. Babenko-Klufas, Ms. Bulyha, Klara Lehka, Olena Nowicka, Bohdan Kekish, Borys Kekish, Paul Liteplo and George Shtohryn.

Ambassador Kuchinsky told the audience that through the sacred music "we are paying tribute to those who 70 years ago in devastated Ukraine died in solitude, in despair, in irreparable sorrow."

Ukrainian sacred music, one of the most striking expressions of the soul of the Ukrainian nation, was always preserved, even in the toughest times in the nation's memory, Mr. Kuchinsky said. "Now it helps us to revive and to strengthen our roots."

Ukrainian World Congress President Askold Lozynskyj, who called for a moment of silence to remember the dead, noted that the memorial concert had a dual significance: it was a requiem observance as well as a celebration of life, because "finally the international community has remembered the victims of the Great Famine, and a sovereign and democratic Ukrainian state serves as the best guarantee that a similar genocide will never be perpetrated again."

The concert, like the film screening, was attended by top officials of Ukraine's Mission to the U.N. and the Ukrainian Consulate General in New York, as well as visiting dignitaries from Ukraine, including Hennadi Udovenko, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada's Committee on Human Rights, and Volodymyr Yelchenko, vice-minister of foreign affairs. Leading officers of Ukrainian national organizations included Michael Sawkiw of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and Iryna Kurowycky of the Ukrainian National Women's League of America.

Among other honored visitors at the concert were Archbishop Antony of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A., who attended with a retinue of clergy from South Bound Brook, N.J. Marta Kokolska, a representative of the Ukrainian World Congress to the United Nations, was mistress of ceremonies.

Film viewers included Margaret Siriol-Colley, niece of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who is credited with bringing the earliest reports of the famine to the West, and her son, Nigel Linsan Colley.

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