Miron Dolot - Execution by Hunger

During the following days, we visited other relatives and friends about whom we were anxious. Anything could have happened to them since we last saw them.

First, we stopped at my friend Vasyl’s house. His father had been arrested and banished to some northern region. He had lived with his mother and two little sisters, but we had heard nothing from him since he had dropped out of school sometime in December of last year. As we entered the house, we saw the two famished girls and their mother. All three of them looked like living mummies. They were crouched silently in the middle of the room on the mud floor. They were cooking weeds, orach and nettle, which grew abundantly in our region. The girls left our greetings unanswered. All their attention was concentrated on the bubbling liquid in the pot. They watched it greedily, with spoons in their hands. The mother started weeping upon seeing us. It took us quite a while to calm her down so she could answer our inquiries about Vasyl, and then she told us his story.

At the onset of the famine, Vasyl had joined some men experienced in traveling to distant places. He went with them to Russia to buy food. He was lucky. He returned home with several loaves of bread and about thirty pounds of flour. That was last December. In March of 1933, when the famine reached its most disastrous proportions, Vasyl decided to repeat his trip, but this time he was not so lucky. He somehow managed to catch a train to a small Russian town not far from Moscow. From there, he was able to inform his mother in some way that he was on his way home. However, he never returned. His mother later learned that he had been arrested at a border railroad station, and eventually tried as a black marketeer, convicted, and given a sentence of five years of hard labor. No one had heard from him since.

There were many cases like Vasyl’s. Despite the official prohibition against travel in search of jobs and food, and in spite of our miserable living conditions and the fact that we were practically in a state of collapse from hunger, we couldn’t simply give up. No one who could still stand wanted to resign himself to death without a struggle.

There was no attempt of any kind to organize some relief for the starving families in our village either by the authorities or by private individuals. On the contrary, when a local teacher tried to put some relief in motion, he was arrested and sent to dig the Baltic Sea—White Sea Canal. He was accused of “spreading false rumors that our villagers were starving.” The idea of organized relief vanished together with him. We were on our own to fight the disaster individually without the benefit of social organization. The mass exodus of the villagers was not only to neighboring towns and cities. Many, like Vasyl, went to farther regions and even to Russia where there was no famine. It was not easy to do, even if one had money. As I’ve noted before, we were not allowed to buy train tickets, except when we had special permission from the village soviet. In 1933, the ordinance was being enforced much more strictly. The trains were guarded by soldiers of the special forces, and it was impossible to sneak onto a train without showing a ticket. Besides that, the villagers did not have the passports which had been introduced the previous December, so it was easier to check all passengers traveling north or east from Ukraine and catch the “illegal” ones. Anyone caught was forcibly returned to his village or sent to a labor camp.

This was an ideal time for the city black marketeers. With their personal passports, they could buy train tickets for travel wherever they wanted to without any difficulties. Then they in turn could resell the ticket to a villager for an exorbitant price. A ticket to Moscow on the black market, for example, would usually cost four or five times as much as its original price.

MOST OF our attempts to find help outside the village were doomed to failure. Wherever a Ukrainian farmer turned up to seek food outside his village, he was hunted like a wild animal. We were forced to forage for our own food from nature.

The lucky and skillful might catch a fish or a bird. Others would try to satisfy their hunger with the tender juicy parts of the abundant river plants and vegetables. The forest offered the hungry its berries, mushrooms, all kinds of roots, and even the leaves and bark of bushes and trees. There was game in abundance too for those with expertise in catching or trapping. But we had no hunting weapons, since all guns had been confiscated long ago.

The fields were the favorite places for foraging. There one had the hope of finding something, mainly root vegetables from last year’s crop, preserved by the winter snow and frost. Potatoes, beets, and onions were priceless for the starving people, even if frozen. “A starving man does not sniff his food,” says the old adage.

As soon as the snow had melted, one could see the miserable figures of the hungry wading in the watery fields in search of something edible. The best find was potatoes. Often those who found them didn’t eat them right then and there, but brought them home and made a kind of potato pancake, mixing them with leaves or even bark.

However, it wasn’t an easy task for people weakened by hunger to wander around in the fields hunting for vegetables. Just to reach the faraway areas required strength and stamina, and many could not make it. Even if they succeeded, many fell dead in the fields from exhaustion before finding anything.

One afternoon, the mother of my school friend Petro came to see us. Crying, she told us that Petro was dying in the field, about two miles from our village. A neighbor who had returned from her frozen potato field trip brought her the news. She had seen Petro in his distress, but was not strong enough to help him. Petro’s mother pleaded with us to help her bring him home, dead or alive.

The story of Petro’s family was no different from that of many other villagers. His father had refused to join the kolhosp, as had all the farmers at first. But the government officials were persistent and used every trick and means to destroy him as an individual farmer. Two years ago, he was appointed leader of a Five. That meant that his house became a meeting place for five farmers and he was fully responsible for them before the government. As the government pressed the farmers to join the collective farm, he had to collectivize all the farmers who belonged to his Five, and, of course, he had to be the first to join the collective farm.

This trick worked well in many instances, but not in the case of Petro’s father. He and the members of his Five loathed the collective farm, and wanted to stay away from it, but he paid dearly for his stubbornness. Petro’s farm was overtaxed, and when he could not meet the tax quota in kind and money, he was arrested as an “enemy of the people” and disappeared somewhere into the Russian north. His farm was confiscated, and his wife and two young children had to move into her parents’ home.

Misfortune followed his wife there too. During the spring of 1932, her parents and her young daughter starved to death, leaving her alone with Petro.

Now, after both of them had somehow managed to survive that famine, young Petro was dying somewhere out there alone in the field.

We could not refuse Petro’s mother’s pathetic please for help, although we ourselves hardly had sufficient strength to stand on our own feet. However, Petro was our friend and neighbor, and since there were no men around in our neighborhood who could help or risk the trip to the field then, we decided to do what we could to rescue Petro.

The only means of transportation we had to bring Petro home was a pushcart, since our horse and wagon had been confiscated two years ago. Taking the cart, Mykola and I headed for the potato field, followed by Petro’s mother, who insisted on accompanying us. We took a field road which, at that time of the year, was very muddy and in many places covered by pools of water coated with icy slush. Our footwear, if one could call it that, was completely inadequate for such a road. Petro’s mother had her feet wrapped in rags; Mykola and I had some old worn and torn shoes wrapped in pieces of tarpaulin. The heavy tarlike mud stuck to our footwear and made it difficult for us to walk. To add to our problems, crossing the mud puddles ankle deep, our footwear got soaked through by the icy, muddy water, making the trip more hazardous and extremely difficult. Petro’s mother, who was trying to keep up with us, could not humanly follow our pace, but sobbing quietly insisted she had no intention of returning to the village; she still lived in the hope of seeing her son alive. Mykola and I decided to put her on the pushcart and tried desperately to pull her. However, she was too heavy for the size of the cart, and, realizing she was holding us up by her persistence, she got off, and we yielded to her wishes to leave her behind.