OTTAWA – The late Stefania Krikun’s memories assumed a quiet poignancy as part of this year’s somber National Holodomor Commemoration ceremony in Canada.
A video of the Edmonton woman, born on February 14, 1923, in the Ukrainian village of Hrynivtsi in the Zhytomyr region, has been online for the past seven years, but was again highlighted as part of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress’s pandemic-prompted virtual commemoration on November 22.
“A lot of people died. I saw this,” Ms. Krikun recalled of the genocidal famine, perpetrated by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet regime, which between 1932 and 1933 claimed the lives of nearly 4 million Ukrainians, according to the findings of the Kyiv Court of Appeal in 2010.