Melissa Dunne Windsor Star - 24 May 2008 http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=d77e4d96-4e5f-4ab3-8099-b594b482d523 If not for finding some buried dead horses and empty corn husks, Stefanie Korostil and most of her family may not have made it through the Ukrainian famine. Korostil was only 12 when her family had to survive on horse meat and ground-up husks, mixed with tree leaves. EATING CORPSES Many of her neighbours, near the Dnieper River about 321 kilometres south of Kiev in Ukraine, resorted to eating human corpses, pets, and grass to stay alive during the Ukrainian famine in the mid-1930s. Eventually, Korostil would lose six relatives, including one of her two brothers, to the what they say was a genocide, also known as the Holodomor. "There was no bread, no nothing," recalled Korostil after a ceremony in Jackson Park Friday, aimed at raising awareness of the Holodomor. "People were dying everywhere ... the bodies were everywhere." This period in Soviet history was kept silent for decades. From 1932-33 approximately seven million Ukrainians were starved to death in what is called the breadbasket of Europe. Ukrainians say it was an act designed to undermine the social basis of Ukrainian national resistance. Mainly peasants and farmers, like Korostil's family, were stripped of all of their food, animals, and most of their possessions. At the height of the famine, Ukrainian villagers were dying at the rate of 17 per minute, 1,000 per hour, 25,000 per day. Now, as the only known survivor of the famine living in Windsor, Korostil does her part to pressure the local, national, and international community to publicly acknowledge the Holodomor as an act of genocide, not a famine. As part of this movement to raise awareness, an international remembrance flame is travelling across 33 countries leading up to the 75th anniversary of the famine this November. When the flame came to Windsor Friday about 50 people, along with Brian Masse (NDP -- Windsor West) and Joe Comartin (NDP -- Windsor-Tecumseh), held a ceremony at the Holodomor Monument in Jackson Park, which was erected in 2005 to commemorate the 72nd anniversary. In Canada a bill to recognize the Holomodor as a genocide and to designate an official annual day of remembrance is set to be approved just before the 75th anniversary this fall. The Soviets denied the famine until 1989, when then-president Mikhail Gorbachev spoke publicly of the tragedy. Despite everything, Korostil has built a rich life for herself in Windsor. With Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1942, Korostil was shipped to Bavaria to a slave labour camp. After the war, she married and immigrated first to the U.S., and later to Canada. She went on to have three children with her husband, who died last month, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. But the events of her early life still haunt her. "I remember everything," said Korostil, now an octogenarian. "People eating people -- you don't forget."