Educating people about the Holodomor

I recently had an interesting conversation with one of my fellow classmates. I was talking about my interest in the history of the famine in Ukraine (or what is known in Ukrainian as the Holodomor, which I know I have mentioned more than once in my blog). The conversation led me to discover that this classmate, who was also a teacher's assistant for an undergraduate history course, had recently led a discussion in one of her tutorials about this very subject. The tutorial was primarily based on two quite extensive and detailed readings that had been assigned to the students of this course. Since the reading was somewhat different from some of the other readings they had been assigned in the past - in the sense that it was more graphic in detail because it was dealing with the starvation of millions of people - the t.a. asked what their reactions were to the readings. One person raised their hand and commented that they considered themselves to be fairly aware of world issues, yet they knew nothing about this particular atrocity. And they questioned why so little was known about it.

During this past year, many Ukrainians have been trying to get the famine taught in the highschool curriculum. Unfortunately, they have been repeatedly denied. I find this interesting because if students in the early years of university were disturbed by the fact that they had not been taught this in past courses, does that not demonstrate that it should be? It was recently recognized as a genocide by the Canadian government...

I often use the example of the famine in Ukraine, because it is a subject I have studied. However, there are a lot of subjects that are not stressed or taught in schools.

I just wanted to share this story with you. It made me somewhat hopeful that more people are becoming aware of what happened during the Holodomor and are questioning why so little is known. This also means that people, hopefully, will want to be more educated on subjects that are not given the recognition they arguably deserve.