Don Lajoie The Windsor Star November 23, 2008 After enduring 75 years of a world in silent denial, Windsor area descendants of those who suffered through the Stalinist famine and genocide in Ukraine are grateful that Canada is leading the way to see that their grief and history finally gain international recognition. Dozens of Ukrainian-Canadians gathered before Ontario's only official memorial to the tragedy, known as the Holodomor, in Windsor's Jackson Park Sunday. They came, according to organizers, to grieve and commemorate those who died but also to celebrate that the history is now "out in the open." "People now know the truth and that all the rumours had a basis in fact, that seven million people did die," said Leisha Nazar-ewich, a local representative of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. "This is important because this tragic event has been denied for such a long, long time." She said the story represented a particularly black period in the dark history of Stalinism, when a deliberate policy to "obliterate" Ukrainian nationalism from the Soviet Union and promote the "Russification" of the most fertile region of the Soviet state resulted in a famine in the Eastern Ukraine, then known as the bread basket of Europe. As Ukrainian peasants were stripped of food, farm animals and nearly all possessions, the population began to die off at a rate that reached 25,000 a day at the height of the famine. Nazarewich said families were reduced to eating domestic animals, tree bark and even resorting to cannibalism to survive. When the famine ended in the mid 1930s, more Ukrainians in the former Soviet Union had died than would lose their lives during the Second World War. Since then, the facts of the genocide were kept hidden from the world. Only with the collapse of the Soviet system did the archives begin to open. Coming to terms Slowly, the international community has been coming to terms with one of the worst genocides of the bloody 20th century. Irene Momotiuk, who attended the ceremony with her husband Justice Harry Momotiuk, said many people of Ukrainian descent, knew of the genocide through family history. Even those who had come to Canada before the famine, as her's did in 1912, still had family in Ukraine and the word would filter out. She said the community is grateful that Canada's Parliament, this summer, passed a bill to officially recognize the Holodomor, one of only a handful of countries to do so. MP Joe Comartin, (NDP Windsor-Tecumseh), who attended the ceremony, said Canada will "keep up the fight" to have the United Nations recognize the genocide, a campaign, he acknowledged, that won't be easy, given the persistent resistance of the Russian delegation to acknowledge the history. "It's critical that Canada has played a leading role," said Comartin, noting that there are 1.2 million Canadians of Ukrainian descent, including 7,000 in Windsor and Essex County. "This is a challenge to the world that there be no repeat of such a genocide."