“ A Candle in the Window”

The front-page article with the above headline was published on Feb. 18, 2003. Every year since then our newspaper has appealed to both readers and our fellow Ukrainians to place a lighted candle in their windows to commemorate the tragic anniversary of the Holodomor. Several years passed before the light-the-candle action started being supported on an official level. Today we pay tribute to the person who first expressed the following words. It is always difficult being the first.

“The five minutes that I was allotted to describe the work of the American commission on the Ukraine Famine did not suffice for even a fraction of what I should have said, other than that we did the best we could with what we had. Ukraine, with a few exceptions like the leader of the communists Petro Symonenko, has now come to basically the same conclusion that we did in 1990: that Ukrainians were the victims of genocide in the 1930s and were crippled to such an extent that many of the shortcomings of the state today are a direct result of it.

“As a citizen of a foreign state, I am not very comfortable making policy recommendations even in the face of catcalls from some communists that I should go back to my American Indians. Yet, the years I have spent researching this tragedy compelled me to try to give one piece of advice that I am not certain was understood. As one who unsuccessfully sought to establish an institute for the study of genocide a decade ago, I can only welcome the current initiative by various political figures to establish an institute to study the famine. The call by the communist Borys Oliinyk to reveal the names of all the guilty parties and all their victims, while far easier said than done, is also commendable, as is the belated movement to erect a monument to the victims. I attempted only to counsel an act of national memory that would be accessible to everyone: that on the national day to commemorate the victims of 1933 (the fourth Saturday of November) a time be designated when every member of this nation, where almost every family lost loved ones, will be invited to place a lighted candle in their windows in memory of those who suffered. This would be a fitting response to the words of Father Oleksander Bykovets, who became a priest in the US:

“Everybody was prepared for sacrifices, and they knew that if not today they would be destroyed tomorrow, but they were troubled by this: would the world know about this? Would the world say something? And there was another problem, of a more intimate character: would there be somebody to pray for those who would perish?

Even after seven decades, lighting a candle in the window seems to me a fitting answer.”

The late Dr. James MACE was a consultant to The Day.