Miron Dolot - Execution by Hunger

“I’ll bet it tastes like a pig, too,” Mykola remarked.

“But how are you going to skin it?” I asked.

“We’ll singe him like people used to prepare pigs before Christmas in the old days.”

Without hesitation, he skillfully bagged the animal. He had convinced me completely. If other people ate lizards, snails, and even rattlesnakes, why couldn’t we eat hedgehogs once we had singed their shaggy coats and sharp quills?

The Communist Party had not as yet passed any law against eating hedgehogs, or any other wild creatures for that matter. Amusing myself with such thoughts, I searched eagerly under the trees and bushes for more of these animals, but was unsuccessful. Mykola, however, found another one, and I could hear him happily shouting that it was much bigger than the first one. Our day was not wasted. We had caught and bagged two hedgehogs, and there was the possibility that we would be just as successful when we reached the river.

Mother had asked us to visit Prokop’s family, our distant relatives who lived on the very bank of the river. Prokop had been arrested last spring for failing to meet the grain and meat quotas. He was taken away one night to the county jail, and that was the last we had heard about him. No one ever had found out his fate. His wife continued living alone with her six-year old daughter in their little house on the river. The last time we saw them was in November, before the first snowfall.

Mother was anxious to know what had happened to them during the cold winter, so we thought a visit to Aunt’s home was a good idea since she knew her way around the river quite well. She also knew much better than we how to charm fish into traps, and we could use her boat.

It was late in the afternoon when we reached Prokop’s house, and we approached it with some trepidation. The past winter had been long and very severe. Many things could have happened to our relatives in their little house by the river. As far as we could tell, it stood safe and sound, but there were no signs of life around it. A small drift of dirty unmelted snow lay in front of the door. The front windows were curtained with some cloth.

We knocked at the door gently at first, and then louder, but no one answered. I grasped the latch and tried to open the door. It was locked. We ran to the windows in the back of the house, but they too were covered with cloth. We saw no other way than to force open the door with all our strength. As we did so, a nauseating stench assailed us. We ran to the windows and tore down the curtains for it was dark inside. The broad daylight streaming through the windows revealed a shocking sight to us. Aunt’s headless body lay on the floor; her head was a few feet away. Apparently it had been torn off her body by some force, but there was not much blood around.

We soon solved the mystery. Looking around, we noticed a rope, ending in a noose, dangling from a beam. Aunt had hanged herself. After a while, her neck had no doubt given way as the body decomposed, which explained the absence of blood.

After overcoming our initial shock, we looked around for the little daughter. We soon found her lying on a sleeping bench. She must have died before her mother. Her eyes and mouth were closed; her tiny hands were folded on her chest. She was neatly dressed in the blue dress she used to wear when she visited us, and her hair had been combed nicely too.

Otherwise, the house was empty. All the furniture had probably been burned for fuel. There was no trace of any food. It was obvious to us that having lost her husband, and having been struck by famine which also took her little daughter, Aunt like our neighbor, Solomia, saw no more sense in living and struggling. Before taking her own life, she carefully locked the door and covered the windows. Her house became their coffin.

The gruesome sight and sickening stench of the decaying human bodies and the awesome silence almost overcame us. We stood there speechless and helpless. Even after so many previous encounters, we felt the creeping horror of death. At that point, we could not stand it any longer, and suddenly had to run outside for fresh air and to regain our composure.

The idea of foraging in the river and on its banks seemed absurd after what we had just experienced, so we suddenly lost all interest in our hunting and fishing expedition, and headed back home.

When we told mother what we had seen in Prokop’s house, she at first reacted to it, as always, very calmly. But she could not completely suppress her emotions for long. After asking us a few more questions, she suddenly turned away from us and gave way to her tears.

We spent the rest of that day preparing our hedgehogs for supper. Mykola expertly dressed them, as if he had been doing it all his young life. The roasted hedgehog meat with potatoes tasted heavenly.

After we had gone to bed, I could not fall asleep for a long time. My aunt’s head staring at me from the floor with her glassy, frightened eyes was still in my mind.

Mother woke us up the next morning before sunrise to go to the house at the river to bury our dead relatives. By the time we arrived there, it was already broad daylight. It had to be a burial without coffins for we had no wood, nails, nor strength to fashion them, neither could we dig a grave. Instead, we used an abandoned potato pit for their remains. We wrapped them in their own hand-woven blankets, and slid them gently into the makeshift grave. After filling it with dirt, Mother said a little prayer, and I placed a wooden cross which I had made by tying together two sticks into the earth above them.

We could no longer cry. We had lived through so much sorrow, and had suffered so many tragic losses that we were left numb.

“Why did they have to die?” Mykola suddenly asked, interrupting the dead silence.

“I wish I knew,” Mother answered.

On the way home I was thinking about our own burial, and who would be left to bury us. I could think of no one.

BY THE beginning of May, our village had become a desolate place, horror lurking in every house and in every backyard. We felt forsaken by the entire world. The main road which had been the artery of traffic and the center of village life was empty and overgrown with weeds and grass. Humans and animals were rarely seen on it. Many houses stood dilapidated and empty, their windows and doorways gaping. The owners were dead, deported to the north, or gone from the village in search of food. Once these houses were surrounded by barns, stables, cattle enclosures, pigpens, and fences. Now only the remnants of these structures could be seen. They had been ripped apart and used as firewood.

Not even the trees were saved from the destruction. The willows, a common sight in Ukrainian villages, stood stark, stripped of branches. It had been too much for the starving villagers to cut down their heavy trunks, and so now they stood alongside the roads, monuments to the battle between the cold winter and the dying people. The fruit trees met the same fate. Half of the famous Ukrainian orchards had been destroyed and consumed as fuel. The remnants were in bloom: one could still see cherry blossoms, apricot blossoms, and blossoms of other trees. But the blooming this spring was different.

In the front yards, backyards, gardens, and all around the villagers’ homes, the ground was pitted with open holes, reminders of the Bread Procurement Commissions’ searches for “hidden foodstuffs.”

The village looked like a ghost town. It was as if the Black Death had passed through, silencing the voices of the villagers, the sounds of the animals and birds. The deathly quiet lay like a pall. The few domestic animals that miraculously survived the famine were looked upon as exotic specimens.