Ukraine

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 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.

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