The Holodomor Museum team held a meeting with representatives of the The Ukrainian National Women’s League of America in the United States

During the trip to the USA, our employees met with Orysia Soroka, the representative of the The Ukrainian National Women’s League of America (UNWLA).

We will remind you that Ukrainian emigrants in the USA created UNWLA at the beginning of the 20th century.

During the meeting, in particular, they discussed the participation of the movement in the coverage of the Holodomor abroad in Soviet times. Emigrants in the USA printed newspapers and information materials, including about the Holodomor crime and repressions in the USSR.

A representative of the UNWLA handed over to the Museum copies of documents from the organization’s archives. Among the transferred files: the minutes of the meetings of the Union of Ukrainian Women of America and the Committee for Immediate Aid to Starving Ukraine, which was created under the UNWLA, correspondence with the Ukrainian diaspora in Europe and Lviv to collect addresses of Ukrainians in the UkrSSR for the transfer of charitable funds to them, appeal to the American press, including to the “New York Times” and their policy of denying the Holodomor, and to the European one with a request to spread information about the extermination of millions of Ukrainians by the Soviet government, as well as appeals to congressmen of various states, officials, scholars and to the US President Roosevelt and the first lady.

In the transferred folder, there are two sheets of a letter from the UkrSSR to the USA with words of gratitude for the help. “I hug you and kiss you from head to toe because you are now saving our lives,” Kolia wrote to his aunt in New York.

Among the materials, there are responses from the State Department, the Red Cross, and publishing houses about “the impossibility of taking the measures requested by the UNWLA.” The Soviet Union did not allow any international aid to Ukraine, instead officially denying the existence of famine.

The museum and UNWLA agreed to expand cooperation, which involves the exchange of scientific research on the Holodomor, the spreading of information in Ukraine about UNWLA’s activities in helping the starving, to preserve the memory of the Holodomor in the Ukrainian diaspora, while the ban on this continued in the USSR, including the transfer of other materials to the Holodomor Museum.

We are thanking the movement for the meeting and willingness to cooperate.