Genocide and Identity
In 1945 one Raphael Lemkin, who described himself as a totally private man that coined a term, developed the concept, and wrote the basic international documents on what we now call genocide, wrote, “Our whole cultural heritage is a product of the contributions of all peoples. We can best understand this if we realize how impoverished our culture would be if the so-called inferior peoples doomed by Germany, such as the Jews, had not been permitted to create the Bible or to give birth to an Einstein, a Spinosa; if the Poles had not had the opportunity to give to the world a Copernicus, a Chopin, a Curie, the Czechs a Huss, and a Dvorak; the Greeks a Plato and a Socrates; the Russians, a Tolstoy and a Shostakovich.”
There were untold millions of Ukrainians who perished in the winter and spring of 1933, condemned by Stalin, along with the intelligentsia that had given them voice, identity, and pride in who they were. Of course, a life is a life, one no less important or dear than another, but a cultural community is also an organism, in which some till the land, others make boots, and still others write poetry. This writer must confess to being a nationalist in some sense. An acquaintance from the Basque Country. Xabier Orxmaetxea, recently wrote that he had been a nationalist of his people since the age of fifteen, but that no nation had the right to oppress another, that peoples who had known oppression should try to help each other, and that for this reason he was introducing a resolution in the Basque Parliament and through the Basque representation in the European Parliament one to commemorate the Holodomor of 1932-1933. This is an old idea that goes back to the eighteenth century to one Johann Gottfried von Herder, who did not want to be a counterfeit Frenchman, who did not speak the language without an accent and preferred not to, but who recognized that the peoples of Africa had their cultures no less valid than those of the Europeans who thought they should rule over them. The Ukrainians have their own tradition of an Asiatic Renaissance in they could help pass on the highest cultural attainments of Europe to those outside that continent but who as peoples were no less and no more than they. This is the heritage of Mykola Khvyliovy, born with the Russian name of Nikolai Fitilёv, but no less a member of the Ukrainian nation that has always and everywhere welcomed those who have come to it with good will.
Who knows how many Shakespeares, Goethes, Tolstoys, Dostoyevskys, Dvoraks, or Mickiewiczes could have sprung from the Ukrainian bosom had there not been the crimes of the Stalin period? Who knows how many Jews could have enriched our culture but not for the Holocaust? I was not born Ukrainian, but they seem to accept me, and I join them in trying to find our own contributions to our national culture, through it to world culture, and thus to the common heritage of humanity. Every soul is precious, and every soul unjustly deprived untimely of life deserves remembrance. It is not least through memory that we become who we are, through history that we gain the sense of who we are, and through the simple ritual of lighting a candle to the memory of those who came before that we confirm the endurance of that unity of culture that originated before us and that we seek to continue for our posterity. The humblest deserves no less from us, for even the greatest of us is no more than he or she. We shall not forget them.
