Memorial to Holodomor victims unveiled in Washington

In the capital of the United States, a memorial has been erected to the millions of victims of the Holodomor, a massive famine that swept Ukraine in the 1930s. According to Voice of AmericaThe monument is a bronze slab mounted on a stone base, which depicts a field of wheat spikelets.

At the same time attended Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Valery Chaly and the author of sculpture, an American of Ukrainian origin Larisa Kurilas.

Photo: Irina Mazur

The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America played a leading role in the implementation of the project. Its president, Tamara Oleksi, called the monument “very significant” for the Ukrainian community in the United States and other countries. The memorial is crowned with the inscription “In memory of the millions of innocent victims of an artificial famine in Ukraine, planned and carried out by the Stalinist totalitarian regime.” The bronze bas-relief, which is called “Wheat Field,” depicts a field of spikelets that, going into the distance, blur and disappear. They symbolize the millions of lives destroyed during man-made famine. Permission to build a monument in the center of the American capital was received in 2006, but construction began only in 2014, after the Firtash Foundation allocated $2,5 million for the project. Support for the implementation of the memorial was also provided by the US Regional Committee for Recognition of the Holodomor as Genocide, the Ukrainian Embassy in the US and the US National Park Service.