OLEXANDER WLASENKO

Date and Place of Birth: 1977 in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada

Date of Interview: June 9, 2015

Place of Interview: Toronto, Ontario

Interviewer: Sophia Isajiw

Length of Interview: 01:16:37 (raw)

Father (Survivor): Serhiy Yakovich Wlasenko, b. 1927 in Lubny, Poltava Oblast, Ukraine

(Excerpt):

I: Do you remember when and how you first learned about the Holodomor and what the situation was?

OW: Yes, I do, I distinctly remember, it was in 1983.

I: And what happened?                   

OW: Well, that was the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor. It was an abstraction to me being, you know, 10 or 11, but that was my first time, yeah. I remember going to a demonstration, a march, at Queen’s Park, I think it was in the fall of 1983. And huge, it was massive, there were thousands upon thousands, what seemed to me like, a very, very large crowd, as far as the eye could see, that was protesting against what was then the Soviet Union and also marking the occasion - the 50th Anniversary of it.

I: So, did you know about Holodomor before that, or that’s when you learned everything?

OW: That’s my conscious recollection, was, yeah, at the age of 10-11, learning about this, knowing that people were starving, there was a starvation.

CROSS REFERENCES:

1. •Olexander Wlasenko was interviewed in the “Share the Story” project series with interviewer Ariadna Ochrymovych, UCRDC Archive File #357 in the archives from April 9, 2012.