Week of commemorating the victims of the Holodomor (November 19-23) began on Monday November 19. On Saturday, November 24 (the last Saturday of November) at 4 p.m. people in Ukraine will light candles in memory of those killed during the genocide of 1932-33. Meanwhile, Ukrainians living abroad have already began honoring the victims of the horrible tragedy. At least 2,000 people gathered for this matter on Saturday in New York.
US government made a statement where they join the people of Ukraine and Ukrainians worldwide that commemorate the victims of the famine and affirm their desire to prevent such tragedies. Radio Svoboda reports that this was mentioned in the statement released by the White House on the behalf of the Press Secretary Jay Carney.
It reads: “We honor the millions who lost their lives during this man-made catastrophe, in which Ukrainian farms and crops were seized in a deliberate attempt to break the will of the Ukrainian people. It is a tribute to the courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people that, even in the face of this unconscionable cruelty, they did not abandon their pursuit of dignity, universal rights, and sovereignty. The struggle of Ukrainians today to build a democracy that upholds those enduring values honors their memory.”
On November 18 at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the French capital memorial service took place for the victims of the Holodomor in Ukraine. Ukrainian Week reports that representatives of the Diaspora, Ukrainian and foreign diplomats, French politicians, military officers, deputies, members of the French government, local government, and community leaders laid flowers near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. “Preservation of historical memory is the life-affirming foundation on which the values of the new Europe are based. The memory of the Holodomor in Ukraine should be a warning to all nations and peoples and it should protect Europe and the world from the repetition of such humanitarian disaster,” said Oleh Yatsenkivsky, director of the Ukrainian Cultural and Information Center in Paris.
The Day, in its turn, will name the fourth laureate of the James Mace Civic Stand Prize on November 21. The James Mace Civic Stand Prize was founded by Larysa Ivshyna and is awarded for the fourth consecutive year for civic position shown by an author in his or her journalistic work. In previous years the winners were the well-known publicists Ihor Losiev, Ihor Siundiukov, and Serhii Hrabovsky. The name of this year’s laureate will be announced on November 21 at 4 p.m. during the solemn meeting of the Public Council of the contest in The Day’s editorial office.
“The essence of the civic position is very important: the important aspects are the intellectual level that would be competitive in the world, humanity, and professionalism. These three features were characteristic of James Mace and, unfortunately, not everyone could reach such level. If the experience of intellectual cooperation was common in society, we would have had a different country. But sometimes we can really see healthy sprouts in the places where there had been no hope of seeing anything like that before,” said The Day’s chief editor Larysa Ivshyna.
The Day invited chairman of the Contest Council, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine Yurii Shcherbak, head of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine Oleh Nalyvaiko, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Head of the Department of History of Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s at the Institute of History of Ukraine Stanislav Kulchytsky, writer and widow of James Mace Natalia Dziubenko-Mace, and the laureates of the Prize from the previous years to the event.
