People starve while their crops rot in stockpiles. A mother, delirious with hunger, kills and roasts her own child after mistaking her for a turkey.

In the 75th year since Holodomor, few Ukrainians and hardly anyone else are aware of how Josef Stalin’s soldiers systematically starved millions of farmers to death, says Red Deer dentist Yar Zuk.

“Imagine if Ottawa decided to block the borders of Alberta, take away most of our farm production and oil, visit our homes to collect any additional supplies, and then they sat back and watched us starve to death.”

The word just never got out, says Zuk, who is named after a survivor who escaped and eventually emigrated to Canada.

Zuk had known for years that he was named after the author of one of the books his father owned. Earlier this month, he decided to learn more about Yar Slayutych.

Zuk was astonished to learn that Slayutych, an author, poet and former professor of Slavic languages at the University of Alberta, had escaped from a train headed for Siberia in the mid-1930s.

He was astonished again to read in an Internet investigation of the professor’s life that Stalin’s forces had starved between seven and 10 million Ukrainian farmers. He has since been in contact with Slayutych, who is 90 years old, and plans to meet with him in Edmonton on Friday.

No one knows the truth about the Ukrainian Holocaust because hardly anyone survived to talk about it, Zuk said on Wednesday. Ukrainian immigrants living in Canada often never learned why their relatives had stopped writing.

Some Ukrainians call it Holodomor, which combines the Ukrainian words for hunger and plague. To Zuk, the word is simply not strong enough to describe what to him is nothing short of mass murder.

He said it’s an interesting coincidence that his discoveries came about at the same time that Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko is paying an official visit to Canada.

Yushchenko addressed Parliament on Monday. On Tuesday the House of Commons passed Bill C-459 with unanimous consent, acknowledging the deliberate starvation of millions of people and setting up a day of remembrance for them.

Under the terms of the bill, the fourth Saturday in each November will be marked as Ukrainian Famine and Genocide Memorial Day, said Scott Deederly, assistant to Red Deer MP Bob Mills.

Profoundly affected by his discovery, Zuk has set up a website to publicize his findings. Anyone interested in learning more about what happened in the Ukraine is invited to www.ukrainianholocaust.org

Its pages contain links to other sites that provide further information.

Contact Brenda Kossowan at bkossowan@reddeeradvocate.com