NEWS AND VIEWS: All genocide victims must be hallowed (03/07/04)

NEWS AND VIEWS

All genocide victims must be hallowed

by Lubomyr Luciuk

The late, great Israel Asper knew nothing is free. Public funds have a price. So his proposal for a Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, underwritten with federal, provincial and municipal contributions, was inclusive. Promised exhibits will cover everything from the wartime internment of Japanese and Ukrainian Canadians to the Chinese Head Tax. Good.

But Mr. Asper's catholic vision appalled those who insisted the museum's focus must be on the Holocaust - "unique" not simply for being "one of a kind," which it was, but in the elevated meaning of being most important, perhaps even the only genocide befouling history.

Inherently discriminatory for casting out the memory of millions of non-Jews enslaved or murdered by the Nazis, such a bias renders the very concept nugatory. If only one people experienced "genocide" what cautionary value does enshrining their nightmare have? Or, put differently, if what Nazis did to Jews can't occur again, why should taxpayers finance another museum (dozens already exist across North America) about something that happened somewhere else, more than a half-century ago?

Barney Sneiderman's thoughtful reflection on these contentions was published not long ago ("Holocaust is unique in way," Winnipeg Free Press, December 13, 2003). While conceding the Holocaust was not a greater evil than other cases of systematic mass murder, the good professor insisted that because the Nazis intended to destroy all Jews, and brought an assembly line to the slaughter, we must accept the Holocaust as somehow "Other." Mr. Asper also believed so, segregating 20 percent of the museum for a Holocaust Gallery.

Indisputably, Hitler's minions killed Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. If somehow they had conquered the world they may have tried to expunge all Jews. We shall never know for, thankfully, it was the Nazis who were erased. Millions died, but Jews survived. Out of revulsion over their massacre, Israel was secured, the ultimate refutation of Hitlerism.

Yet, as Europe was liberated by force of arms, Stalin and the architects of the genocidal Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, the Holodomor, endured. Not only did Ukraine lose more people than any country in Nazi-occupied Europe but more Ukrainians perished in the Terror-Famine than all the Jews murdered in the six years of the second world war.

The Holodomor (literally, death torture by forced starvation), was as deliberate an act of a perverted state as the Holocaust. What is different, however, is that the latter stopped when the Nazis were defeated. The man-made Famine started and ended when Stalin said so.

Today who denies or does not know of the Holocaust? Nuts and know-nothings. Victims still recall it, as they should. In contrast, Holodomor survivors often won't speak. They are silent for good reason.

After the war millions of "Soviet Ukrainians," press-ganged into the Third Reich, found themselves in Western Europe. Finally free? No. The Yalta Agreement decreed everyone who was a "Soviet citizen" on or before September 1, 1939, must return.

Thousands of refugees were handed over by British, American, French and, yes, even Canadian soldiers, often at bayonet point. Their forcible repatriation was, as Prof. Watson Kirkconnell, president of the Baptist Federation of Canada, wrote to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, a "war crime." Many a returnee was executed after delivery.

Avoiding repatriation meant lying about who one was. Righteous Western Ukrainians, technically Polish citizens not liable to refoulement, surreptitiously schooled Eastern or "Russian" Ukrainians about life in interwar Poland - coaching necessary to fool screening. How many "Soviet citizens" were rescued by deception? No one knows. But I have met many who were so saved, most recently in Winnipeg. Knowing that denaturalization and deportation are the penalty for obtaining Canadian citizenship falsely, they can't bear witness publicly. To do so would be to admit they were "Soviet citizens," liars when naturalized.

Until 1991, when the Soviet canker exfoliated, its barkers were all Famine deniers. A bevy brayed how those who had refused to come "home" were nothing but rogues, concoctors of preposterous "myths" about Famine-Genocide, diverting attention from their misdeeds as "Nazi collaborators." Some "useful idiots" shill still. To challenge their calumnies required admitting you were an illegal immigrant, risking the brand of right-wing émigré, or worse. Few dared.

Deep anxieties also persist over what might happen "back home" if one is too vocal about the Soviet past. Yesteryear's apparatchiks remain influential, undercutting sporadic calls for criminal prosecution of the perpetrators of Communist crimes against humanity.

While its victims are now officially remembered on the fourth Saturday every November, the Holodomor has not become a rallying point in Ukrainian national consciousness, akin to the Holocaust for Jews. Israel defends Jewish interests worldwide, Ukraine does not even pretend to. Israel can't forget the 6 million. Ukraine pretends the remains of many millions more do not saturate its rich black earth.

The Holodomor harvested Ukrainian society, left it, as British observers noted, "atomized," the only song in many a village the demented chortling of cannibals. Ukraine is a post-genocidal society, feculent for ignoring this past.

Whereas the Holocaust's engineers were punished, Ukraine's reapers haven't faced justice. Even history fails to condemn them, for critical archives remain hidden, in Russia. Keen to gorge on a disproportionate share of Soviet assets, Moscow palters over culpability for the Famine the Soviets wrought. The Russians even lobbied at the United Nations to ensure the Holodomor was not defined as genocide. Would German diplomats try to sidebar the Shoah? Inconceivable.

The Great Famine was the genocide few knew of. Many "powers and principalities" are trying to ensure we never learn more. That alone makes the Holodomor unique. For the Canadian Museum of Human Rights to become world class, one of a kind, the truth about the Holodomor and other genocides must be told there, all Holocaust victims hallowed together. I'm sure that's what Izzie would have wanted.

Prof. Lubomyr Luciuk is author of "Searching For Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada and the Migration of Memory" (University of Toronto Press, 2001) and director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

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