Students in North Bay learn about Holodomor genocide in travelling RV exhibit

A travelling exhibit is teaching students in North Bay more about the Holodomor famine, which took place in Eastern Europe more than 90 years ago.

A retrofitted RV with special seats and a digital presentation has been parked at St. Joseph-Scollard Hall Catholic Secondary School in the city for the past few days.

A retrofitted RV with special seats and a digital presentation has been parked at St. Joseph-Scollard Hall Catholic Secondary School in the city for the past few days. (Eric Taschner/CTV News)

It’s called the Holodomor Mobile Classroom and it teaches students about a genocide that killed millions of Ukrainians.

"I really didn’t know anything about it. So, it was a pretty interesting experience," said Katie Sicard, a Grade 12 student at St. Joseph-Scollard Hall.

The retrofitted RV was turned into a mobile display. It travels across the country teaching students about how extreme ideologies enabled mass-scale political repressions through widespread intimidation, arrests and imprisonment.

"The Ukrainians wanted to keep their independence from the Soviet Union," said Roma Dzerowicz, the Holodomor National Awareness Tour’s project manager.

But Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had plans to collectivize agriculture in 1929. A famine was engineered that killed between five million and seven million Ukrainians from 1932-1933.

The Holodomor, which literally translates to 'death by hunger,' was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions aimed mostly at or only at Ukraine.

A retrofitted RV with special seats and a digital presentation has been parked at St. Joseph-Scollard Hall Catholic Secondary School in the city for the past few days. (Eric Taschner/CTV News)

In 1932, the Communist Party set impossibly high quotas for grain that Ukrainian villages were required to contribute to the Soviet state.

A majority of Ukrainians, who were small-scale farmers, resisted. The state confiscated the property of independent farmers and forced them to work on government collective farms.

The more prosperous farmers and those who resisted were branded 'kulaks' (rich peasants) and declared enemies of the state and were to be eliminated as a class.

When the villages were not able to meet the quotas, authorities amped up the requisition campaign, confiscating even the seed set aside for planting and levying fines in meat and potatoes for failure to fulfill the quotas.

Starving farmers

Starving farmers attempted to leave their villages in search of food, but Soviet authorities issued a decree forbidding Ukraine’s peasants from leaving the country.

A law was introduced that made the theft of even a few stalks of grain an act of sabotage punishable by execution.

It’s been described as a genocide by 35 countries, including Canada.

"We learned that a lot of people didn’t believe it was real and that they were trying to hide this," said Rachel Miller, a Grade 8 student at St. Hubert Catholic Elementary School.

The USSR vigorously denied the Holodomor had occurred, and several Western journalists based in the Soviet Union denied the government‘s policies and its brutal enforcement tactics were causing the Ukrainian people to starve.

But as the famine dragged on, journalists such as Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge risked their careers by exposing the Soviet Union’s coverup.

Last year, the Ontario government introduced new mandatory learning in the Grade 10 Canadian history course about the Holodomor famine and its impact on Canada’s Ukrainian community.

"We’re using it as a stepping stone for democratic rights, civility, tolerance, equity, and most importantly, our human rights values that are being abused," Dzerowicz said.

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The mobile classroom features 60-minute sessions with documentaries on the Holodomor with interactive learning. Dzerowicz says it’s all about empowering today’s youth to use their voices and stand up for what is right.

"We can spread the word and make sure this doesn’t happen again," said St. Hubert Catholic Elementary School Grade 8 student Katie Jackson.

In the hopes of avoiding autocracy and fight for democracy.

"We are trying to move forwards as a society instead of moving backwards," Sicard said.