[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9443-9444]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                UKRAINE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, the people of Ukraine have been struggling 
to achieve a fair, independent, and strong democracy since the 
oppressive Soviet yoke was shed in 1991, but recent events in the 
southern Ukrainian city of Zaporozhia have raised alarm.
  A seven-foot tall statue of Joseph Stalin, the World War II Communist 
tyrant of the Soviet Union who was responsible for the Holodomor famine 
genocide in which millions upon millions of people starved to death, as 
well as the deaths of millions of Ukrainians, Pols, Russians, and so 
many others inside that tyranny, has been built outside of the city in 
front of the Communist Party headquarters. Even worse, Zaporozhia 
authorities just denied opposition groups the right to assemble to 
object to the statue's public display.
  Since World War II, the world has come to know that Joseph Stalin 
killed over 50 million people inside those borders, and the repressive 
legions that supported him were responsible for such agony for so many. 
The elevation of Joseph Stalin with a monument is an affront to those 
who have fought for freedom around the world. Just as a monument to 
Adolf Hitler in Germany would be unacceptable, freedom lovers simply 
cannot stand by silently while a monument to Stalin, the mass murderer 
of the 20th century, is erected in Ukraine.
  The story of U.S. citizen Eugenia Sakevych-Dallas, a survivor of the

[[Page 9444]]

famine genocide in Ukraine, can clearly express how Ukraine and her 
people were treated under the iron fist of Joseph Stalin. She describes 
herself as a survivor of the forced famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933. She 
recounts: It is with tears of joy for the future and salty tears of 
pain for the past that I write this account of my survival. It is the 
bone-chilling nightmare of every child to have their parents dragged 
away by force, never to see them again; siblings sent to prisons, 
parents sent to their deaths.
  She was born in Mykolaiv Oblast and came from a happy family living 
off the land, but that happiness was stolen when, at the age of 5, they 
were forced to give away their home, their land was confiscated, and 
all their domestic animals were taken from them. Like many Ukrainians, 
they were left on the streets to starve. They were called ``Kulacs''--
enemy of the people. Her father was arrested first. The Communists came 
and picked up her family one by one, leaving her an orphan, an orphan 
crying with unbearable psychological wounds, alone, afraid, and 
starving.
  She remembers her beloved mother during that time trying to feed the 
children, doing what any mother would to care for her offspring. She 
found a few rotten potatoes in a field, and, for this, Stalin's 
lieutenants arrested her and she was sent to Siberia. The prisons 
during that time were overpopulated with people who had done nothing 
but try to survive.
  Memories flood back to her, as do tears, and she remembers the long, 
long lines of men waiting for stale, molding half loaves of bread for 
hours upon hours. Etched in her mind is one man whom she did not even 
know that finally reached the end of the line and, with starvation in 
his eyes, grabbed the little loaf and started to bite into it, 
swallowing it as fast as he could and then dropping dead right in front 
of her.
  Starvation is an odd thing, she writes. An empty stomach taking in 
bread is like swallowing cement. It does not absorb the nutrients. It 
hardens and kills the human body. I lost my dear sister to starvation, 
a forced death, legalized murder, or murder that the Communists, at 
Stalin's behest, decided was mercy killing.
  They were constantly on the run while her family was being picked off 
one by one by the Communists. And as starvation took hold of the 
Ukrainian people, hatred filled their hearts for Soviet Moscow. Many 
faces still haunt her today--the trains of people, families, old, 
young, starving, sick, hauled off with standing room only in those box 
crates. She became one of the children of the street, one of the few 
survivors of that tragic time in history who ate grass, pinecones, and 
anything that was chewable in the shadows, afraid that they might be 
taken away. People were begging, starving, eating anything they could 
find--a dead horse if they were lucky. Thousands of people were falling 
over dead, millions upon millions of innocent people killed under the 
Communists.
  It was a sad time in history where, during the height of the famine, 
Ukrainian villagers were dying at the rate of 17 per minute, 1,000 per 
hour, and 25,000 per day, leaving only a few survivors to keep the 
history alive. They were stacked up like logs.
  The horror and panic of that time of tyranny is still with her. The 
hunger that plagued Russia and tortured the Ukrainian people in their 
scheme to slaughter and take over and annihilate the middle class, she 
says, Let us not forget. It is our duty to bring the memories and truth 
to the world. We must expose the hardships, the horrors, and the truths 
so that these atrocities never can happen again.

                          ____________________