“…There was nothing to eat. There were no potato peelings to eat! And this poor child, I can see it now, sitting at the table, licking its fingers and crying: “Mummy, I’m starving.” That’s where it died, at that table. And where can you find anything to eat if there is no food? There was absolutely nothing in the house. Only salt” [Dybyntsi village].
Today, on 26 November, Ukraine commemorates the victims of the terrible genocide – the Holodomor of 1932-1933 and the mass man-made famines of 1921-1923 and 1946-1947.
The famine terror did not spare Bohuslavshchyna. Today, we are going to share with you the stories of families who survived this terrible disaster and tell you about those who were killed by the russian soviet regime, only because they were Ukrainians.
“It was a terrible thing, they were raking the last things out of the houses,” recalls Nina, a woman from Kydanivka. There was a woman with four kids. And she died, she got sick. And the children stayed behind. They came here to live with their grandmother, Maria. They were crawling around in the nooks and crannies, looking for food: “You used to give us food, grandma, but now you don’t give us any?” It was horrible… They all died. These were my mother-in-law’s kids and nephews, and they died at the same time.
A lot of people died then. There was a woman where my grandmother lived, and her baby died, so she had to eat it.”
Moreover, the woman says, while people in Ukraine were literally dying of hunger, in russia, bread was being fed to cattle: “My grandfather Varion was in Moscow, and they were feeding pigs with bread rolls. We had a famine in 1933, and there they were feeding pigs with rolls. And they wrote to him telling what was going on here. And he did not believe it. He came, he didn’t believe it, that is why he came to see it with his own eyes. And here was a terrible famine.”
And people died from that hunger, small children. We had to beg for bread, eat it so that no one could see, hide. If there was any. For the most part, there was nothing. Ms Kateryna, from Semyhory, recalls that all her older brothers and sisters died in 1933, all of them starved to death: “My mother had many children, 12 of them. And they all died in the famine, in 1933. Here, in Semyhory. My mother lived here. She said that the harvest was very poor, there was no harvest at all, nothing. Sometimes they took away cows and calves that people owned. But she had nothing to take from her. And there were 12 children. All of them died. Only my mother survived… And in 1947 it was very hard… But my mother used to bring food from the collective farm, and they gave it to us. A pot of soup and a piece of bread. In 1947, there was a famine, but it was not the same as in 1933. I remember going to beg for bread. And my mother brought some, so she divided it up – for the morning and for the evening. “Don’t eat before dinner, because God is watching, he will slap your hands.” And I was hiding under the table, taking out that piece and eating it.”
Mr Mykhailo from Deshky was six years old when the Holodomor happened. He says that no one in his family died, but he remembers well how people in the village perished. He also remembers well how everything was taken away from people. And it was “their natives”, local people from the village who took everything, condemning their fellow villagers to a terrible, hungry death: “…They took everything away back then. They were coming to the houses. Villagers! Not strangers! They would send someone from the regional administration, a chief, and he would come and pick up people like that… just like now. And so they would go around with such spires, looking everywhere. In the yards, where people might have dug up or hidden something. And we had one man who had some lard left over, and what to do with it? He hung it in a sack under the attic. Those people came up and looked – the attic was empty, there was no grain, nothing. And so he had it left. They didn’t take it away, as they did not find it.
After I got married here, my mother-in-law and father-in-law told me that these village people took all the grain, took it somewhere, and then kept it for themselves. They would then hide it at night.”
Sometimes, he says, they would take the last of the food by sneaking into the house: “My father worked in Bohuslav at a cloth factory. They were given rations there – flour. That’s how we managed to survive for a while. My mother would bake cakes with that flour, we would eat, and she would hide the remaining flour over the stove. She would take us to my grandfather’s house, and she would go to the collective farm to work. She would come home in the afternoon and see that someone had opened the window – there were dirty footprints from the window, on the bed, on the floor – and someone had taken the flour. My grandfather worked as a forester, so he lived well. So we were lucky. And then there was this boy, I remember, maybe 14-15 years old. He asked for food too. So my mother gave him some baked beetroot. He went to the forest by the riverbank, to a well, ate the beetroot, drank some water, and remained there. People buried him then.”
But not everyone could even bury their relatives who died of the famine caused by the soviet genocide, says 97-year-old Nadiya Tymoshenko, from the village of Dybyntsi: “My father died in 1933. They wanted him to go robbing people with another man, but he did not go. He hid. And then he came home and said: “Sit on the chest and look out the window, when they come up to the house, so that you can give me a sign.” And I sat there and said: “Dad, they’re coming! They’re coming for you!” And where could you hide? There was nowhere to hide! So he hid in the chest. And they started looking around. They look, no sign of him. They came to that chest, and he was there. They took him away. To the police station. There he got infected with typhus. They took him to the hospital. And he died in that hospital. There was nothing to eat there either. My mother went to visit him, but he was not there. He was in a pit. They dug it out and threw 10 people in a pile in whatever they were wearing. In the hospital, in Bohuslav. But they never managed to take him out. We did not see him and did not bury him.”
Both Nadiya’s father and brothers died of starvation. Only she and her mother survived. Now she still doesn’t know how they managed to survive: “We used to go to the mountain to pick linden leaves. There, my mother dried them on a bed and then crushed them, and then we made water and pancakes. She took me to Ros’ river, where I was left alone, and people were catching fish. I was so small, inexperienced at all, I grabbed it and ate it with everything, with guts, without salt, without anything. My mum would yell at me, saying that I was going to die.
I remember, we would pick white acacia and eat it. There was absolutely nothing to eat.”
And even what they had, which they hid to feed their children, they found and took away. And again, those were locals, says Nadia Tymoshenko: “They ransacked everything from the cellars, from the storerooms: every potato, straw, grain. One day we were lying on the stove, and my mother poured millet underneath us sleeping, three or four kilograms, she said. A man came and scooped the millet from under us. My mother was crying, she said: “Please leave some for the children”. They took that millet away. They took everything from us. There was only water and salt in the house. There was nothing else… And those were locals, from Dybyntsi.
Now there is none of them left. But their children were left behind. Because they took everything for their children. So they have their children living now.”
To survive, people shared the last piece of bread. And this trait of giving the last to help seems to be present in Ukrainians even now, somewhere on the genetic level. Hanna Narizhna, from Ivky, recalls how she used to treat her father to bread as a little girl: “There was a famine in 1933. So my father went to Skvyra to earn money to feed the family. He took me there as a little girl. I remember going to the nursery there. So I was there during the day, and at night he took me to the dormitory. There was a distillery there… They made vodka there. Potatoes were placed in these storehouses. It was my father who used to store those potatoes for the winter. I remember being in that nursery school during those famines. They gave us a piece of bread. And in the evening I would bring a piece of bread and give it to my father, as he was there in the dining room. I would cry and say, “Take some bread from me. I treated my father with that bread, I remember that.”
It might seem that this cannot happen again nowadays. But even now, we see and experience russian terror every day, which causes Ukrainians to die from cold and hunger, from shelling, missiles and torture.
And today we want to express to the whole world that we remember! We will not forgive! We will take revenge for every life that has been taken, for every spikelet of grain that has been burnt and for every tear. And the empire will fall. And the greedy neighbouring country will pay dearly for all the evil it has done for centuries.
