Miron Dolot - Execution by Hunger

Often starvation would sweep away an entire family. The adult members would die first, leaving the children alone in a cold house, half-naked and hungry, to fend for themselves. One can imagine what happened to such hopeless children: these orphans, scantily clad and feet wrapped in rags, joined the rest of the beggars. Struggling in the snow, they would first go to their nearest neighbors only to find that they too were dead. Then they would go to another house and yet another farther away. Compassionate villagers who were still alive would let a child or two stay with them only to watch them slowly die.

Yet miraculously, some children managed to survive. These were mostly boys and girls between ten and fifteen years of age. With the coming of spring, they saw their chances of survival in terms of leaving home, and going to the city. A few, but very few, children managed to do just that and were fortunate in finding help and understanding from some of the urban dwellers. Others, less fortunate, were picked up by the militia and locked up in the Children’s Detention Home. These children had a better chance of surviving the famine, although we heard that many of them also died. And then, there were those whose fate it was to join the ranks of the city’s juvenile criminals. God alone knows what happened to them. Finally, there were those who neither reached the city nor were picked up by the militia. They lay dead wherever they had fallen for days or even weeks, until someone would drag them out of sight into some ditch like a dead animal.

I saw many tragic events in which children were the innocent victims, but one episode in particular emerges from my memories of that spring as a symbol of humanity gone completely mad. It was sometime at the onset of April. One early morning while we still lay in our beds, we heard a child’s cry and a weak knocking on the door. I was the first to jump out of bed. As I opened the door, I saw a small girl of about four. She stood trembling from the cold and exhaustion with streams of tears flowing down her famished little cheeks. We knew her! It was Maria, the daughter of our neighbor Hana, who also had a seven-year-old son and lived about half a mile from us. Hana’s husband, a young and industrious farmer, had been arrested like many others, for no apparent reason, and exiled somewhere to a concentration camp about two years before. Hana was left alone with her two children to struggle for food, like all the rest of us. However, as winter came and starvation struck us, we lost track of her.

I let the child into the house.

“My mommy won’t wake up!” the child announced, wiping away the tears with the sleeve of her dirty coat.

Mother and I glanced at each other. A short while later, my brother Mykola and I were on our way to Hana’s home. When we entered the house, our fears were confirmed. Hana was dead, lying on her back on the sleeping bench. Her bulging glassy eyes seemed to be looking at us. Her widely opened mouth still seemed to be gasping for air. We could see that she had met her death not too long before Maria had knocked on our front door. On Hana’s cheek we could still see the traces of her tears; we could also see the lice still moving back and forth like ants, in search of a warm spot. Next to her, wrapped in some cloth, lay her dead son. The one-room house was empty and dirty. There was no furniture except for two benches, and no trace of food. The mud floor had been dug up all over, and there were holes in the walls. The chimneys of the cooking and heating stoves were totally ruined. We recognized immediately the work of the Bread Procurement Commission. There was no doubt that they had been there recently, searching for “hidden” foodstuffs.

Mykola and I stood there aghast. I felt the impulse to either run away screaming, or to sit down next to their dead bodies and hold their cold hand in mine in sorrow and sympathy, but I did neither. I just stood there petrified, and looking at the dead mother and her young son, I asked the question:

“Why? Why did they have to die?”

We left the bodies in the house hoping that soon the kolhosp burial brigade would pick them up on their daily search for bodies. This brigade was set up about two months before for the purpose of collecting and burying the corpses of the starved villagers.

Little Maria survived the famine. She stayed with us for a while until her relatives, who lived in one of the cities, took her into their family.

ONE DAY, at the end of April 1933, I remember my mother suggesting that my brother and I make a visit to our distant relative Priska, who lived about four miles from our home. We gladly agreed. On our way we could also visit some of our acquaintances and school friends whom we had not seen since the beginning of last winter. We often wondered what had happened to them, and we were prepared for the worst.

We took the road along a strip of sand dunes that separated the woods from our neighborhood. It was here we had hidden some of our food. It was a pleasant, sunny spring day. All around us birds fluttered form bush to bush, chirping cheerfully. New greenery was visible everywhere, but not a single human being was in sight; there were no human voices to be heard. We did not see any cats or dogs. It was as if some terrible plague had passed through the village, leaving alive only the birds and the insects.

We passed by Antin’s house on the hill where a few weeks before we had looked for our friend Ivan. Approaching closer, we heard to our surprise some boisterous voices. There was activity around Antin’s house: some people were searching for something. We couldn’t help stopping to see what was going on, and what we discovered was the Hundred’s Bread Procurement Commission in action. The village Thousander, Comrade Livshits, was personally overseeing the search and seizure operation. He stood in front of the house shouting orders from time to time. Several Commission members were digging around the house with spades. Others were busy inside the house and in the shed.

Absurd as it may seem, the Bread Procurement Commission in our village continued its search for “hidden” foodstuffs, in spite of the mass starvation raging all around them. They continued going from one house to another, paying special attention to those who showed some signs of life. They also continued demanding grain quotas, or simply searched farmers’ premises without even bothering to ask their permission. It was also necessary and mandatory for us to attend meetings and listen to propagandists, agitators, and other Party officials harangue us endlessly about the merits of grain delivery to the state, or what the Party and government position was on certain issues and events, or what decrees had newly been passed by the state. Naturally, only a very few individuals were seen at such meetings since many of our number had already been killed by famine. Those left alive no longer had the physical strength to leave their homes.

But thanks to those meetings, those of us able to attend learned that sometime in January the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, after accusing Ukraine of deliberately sabotaging the fulfillment of grain quotas, had sent Postyshev, a sadistically cruel Russian chauvinist, as its viceroy to Ukraine. His appointment played a crucial role in the lives of all Ukrainians.

It was Postyshev who brought along and implemented a new Soviet Russian policy in Ukraine. It was an openly proclaimed policy of deliberate and unrestricted destruction of everything that was Ukrainian. From now on, we were continually reminded that there were “bourgeois-nationalists” among us whom we must destroy. They were the ones causing our “food difficulties.” Those hideous “bourgeois-nationalists” were starving us to death, and on and on went the accusations. At every meeting, we were told that the fight against the Ukrainian national movement was as important for the “construction of socialist society” as the struggle for bread. This new campaign against the Ukrainian national movement had resulted in the annihiliation of the Ukrainian central government as well as all Ukrainian cultural, educational, and social institutions. There were also arrests in our village as a result of this new policy.