Anonymous female narrator, b. 1915 on a khutir somewhere in Ukraine, the
daughter of a deculakized and repressed peasant. Narrator's husband was also
arrested and her mother-in-law subjected to a brutal body search. Narrator gives
information on the suppression of the church and blames Stalin, Kaganovich, and
the international communist conspiracy for the famine, during which she was in
an industrial area, probably Donbas, where she saw many starving peasants.
Пит.: Цей свідок зізнає анонімно. Будь ласка, скажіть, в жому
році Ви народилися?
Від.: В 1915-му році.
Пит.: А де саме?
Від.: В селі.
Пит.: Назву села Ви не хочете сказати?
Від.: Ні.
Пит.: Добре. А область?
Від.: Ні,
також.
Пит.: А чим займалися Ваші батьки?
Від.: Мій батько
був селянин.
Пит.: Чи він був бідняк, чи середняк, чи куркуль?
Від.: Називалися тоді люди, які потенціяльно бачили до чого
комуністичний Інтернаціонал веде, їх незалежно від кількості господарств, то їх
називали куркулями. Хоч він по закону радянському ніколи не міг бути куркульом.
То було спеціяльно видумана форма, щоб екслуатувати людину й маси, казати, що
він недобрий, от ми його посилаємо на Сибір, забираємо в нього господарку.
Батько мій виїхав на хутір, там ближче була до хати. Всі дістали одинакову
ділянку. Звичайно в житті не одинакові люди, не всі люди мають одинакрвий підхід
до проблем. А, мій батько був заможний, тоді йому, уродило, уродив рік і він мав
зерна повно. В 27-му році, коли Каганович був секретарем комуністичної партії,
то його обклали пшеницю віддати державі. Він віддав, але ще було в 27-му році,
що залишилося йому на те, щоб він прожив і посіяв. У 28-му році трапилося, що
знову їх обкладали селян там великими обов'язакми здати велику кількість
пшениці. До того їх вимагали, що вони віддали все останнє. Потім було
організовані такі 100.000-ники, і ходили по хатах, провіяли чи залишилося щось
утих селян, чи не залишилося.
Пит.: Чи це були українці чи приїжджі?
Від.: Ті 100.000-ники то переважно ніхто не говорив з них
по-українському. То були чужі люди. Часом вони використовували голову сільради.
Бо якби голова сільради їх не приводив до батькової хати, то він не був би
покараний. Вони приводили туди. Шукали вони той хліб, навіть той гній від
скотини розривали й дивилися чи там не е захований хліб. І в такий спосіб
осталося село в 28-му році виснажене. Тільки такі селяни, що рахувалися бідні,
або не мали рабочу силу, хоч може вони й мали трошки пшениці, але в них то
залишилися, а цих бідних, яких називали куркулі, їм було дуже тяжко пережити той
рік. У 29-ім році, мій батько каже, в селі, на хуторі: — Я хочу свою хату
віддати, щоб ми зробили школу тут, бо то новий хутір. А вони на зборах сказали
по-російському. — „Мы приготовили вам место там где вечная мерзлота." То, батько
прийшов до хати і то розказав це, що їх чекав. Тільки батько був високо-освічена
на той час людина, він весь час готувався, що щось мусить трапитися. Ну, після
того, як на тих зборах, коли батько запропонував свою хату на школу,
проголосували всі люди, щоб батька вислати. Але на щастя, я була вдома, бо я не
виростала в батьковій хаті, тільки провідувала батька. На щастя я бачила як ті
селяни до рана, до розвітанку лізли на Communist Internationalism, called
Comintern or диктатура пролетаріята, started the total destruction of the farmer
who was basically the preserver of Ukrainian culture or heritage because we were
occupied by a czar before. All the foreigners on my land, maybe they were in the
minority, always joined the power. Under the czar they joined the czarist
government, under the communists they joined the communist government against
Ukrainians. We resented this, we stood from day one against the revolution. All
the fires started from Petrograd and big industrial centers, not in Kiev. The
people who were losing the crown by the czaristic regime were also oppressive on
Ukraine. And as I see the conspiracy of internationalism, proletarian so-called
диктатура, from Marx teachings, it is consistent seeing in Ukraine the
starvation which started in 1927 when Kaganovych was the General Secretary of
the Communist Party. He attacked the most productive farmers, giving them the
obligation to return their harvest goods to the point that they had no way of
surviving through the year. In 1927 it was still possible to survive, but in
1928 a law was passed that stated that productive farmers – I call them
productive because after the revolution the land was divided equally so people
who had the wisdom, who labored and had big families did well – had to return
everything to the government which demanded from them astronomical amounts of
produce. The government attacked the most highly productive farmers. Later they
called them kulaks. In 1929 the whole mass of farmers saw a conspiracy that they
were being attacked in order to destroy them; they saw where the government was
heading. The head of the Communist Party, Kaganovich, decided that the most
productive and the most intelligent farmers, although they might not be rich by
the amount of the harvest, be put on the list of kulaks who were to be sent to
Siberia. In the villages where my father lived, a small village called хутір, my
brother was killed in April 1929 by the Komsomol crowd. Everyone knew that this
had been done to instill fear in the farmers so that they would not strike. In a
few weeks there was a meeting and my father heard that someone would be sent to
Siberia, and at the meeting he proposed to give up his house for a primary
school in хутір, a small village but he wanted it so kids seven years old could
go to хутір school. A man who lived in the same village came and said that the
government had sent a directive that we have to send you to Siberia where there
is always ice. Who is for that? Everyone voted against my father because when my
brother was killed they saw what they did to people. Besides, when the trial was
held for those who had killed my brother – he was alive 24 hours after he was
mortally wounded – the court said that because he was a son of a kulak, the
guilty people could go home. And you wonder why those people voted against my
father? Fear already was instilled by killing my brother. I am a witness. I
visited my father and I witnessed farmers coming at night, almost crawling on
their bellies, saying forgive us but they killed your son and they will kill our
son. In a few weeks I came again to visit my father. It was 20 miles from the
place where I was raised, and my father was not home. My mother was unconscious
and they were taking her to the railroad station. How it was, I do not know. I
remember when they came to look for wheat, they opened even manure-horse manure
or cow manure- piles looking for wheat. It was January of 1929 that they asked
all of us to take off our clean clothes, took us up to the attic, and asked us
to put on dirty clothes. One of my brothers did not want to take off his jacket
because he was 18 and he had a girlfriend. My mother dropped on her knees and
begged him to please take jacket off because they will kill you and he did take
off his jacket. In a cold house we were left shivering. So we did know that in
January they did send someone to Siberia. The idea was already in the air. When
they were taking papa and my brother, my mother was unconscious and the NKVD-man
said in Russian "she will be ready in the morning, she will die". But there are
miracles in the world that many witness and she lived 100 years. When they sent
them to Siberia, of course, we all left the village. My godmother raised me. In
1929 I was already 14 years of age, and I left the village. We went to an
industrial area where nobody knew that my mother was a kulak and that I am a
kulak's daughter. It is important to note that when we buried our brother we put
a cross on his grave as is our custom over there. Everybody had a lot of pain in
their lives, and as a symbol of that tragedy we put a cross on the grave. When
she was visiting his grave she had a hard time understanding why that
anti-Christian, communist philosophy even leveled the grave! They took the cross
the first day. She didn't put another one up, but she always put a pile of dirt,
and when she would return the pile of dirt would be leveled. She had to figure
out where his grave was. We lived in a coal mining industrial area. They
rationed to each person 400 grams of bread. To get this 400 grams you had to go
early in the morning, which I did. When I came there were always dozens of dead,
young, beautiful bodies around that bread store. When I got home I was crying so
hard and my mamma said to me "why do you cry? Those children's relatives voted
to send your father to Siberia!" At that time I didn't understand how things
were in our poor, small village, how the law worked on my brother's tragedy. Now
I understand: they were under pressure and that they had no choice but to vote
against my father if they wanted to live tomorrow. I'm saying this because
people say "well, those Ukrainians are stupid. Why didn't they revolt?" And
there was a law that stated that you cannot leave the village without permission
from the official. That's why I saw all the young people who took risks around
the store where I received the one pound of bread. The hunger was so severe that
people were running through the night. One day I went to the center of that coal
mining town, and there were people who were running after other people. Swollen,
hard-looking people. I didn't know what they were doing, then. Later on it was
said that if they caught me they could kill me and eat me. I would rather die by
gas chamber that from starvation.
Question: What year was this?
Answer: This was in 1932. in 1933 I was in Kharkiv walking along the
street, and there was a woman sitting on the sidewalk with a baby. She was so
swollen. At that time I was already almost 16, and I said how beautiful the baby
was and asked if I could help her? A lady came up to that woman to give her
something and I watched. From somewhere a man came and he said in Russian,
"Lady, this is not for you. We have the government for that". When I came back
to the site I saw that the lady was dead and the baby was crawling and no one
was approaching them because they were afraid. This is unbelievable. I hope you
see how deeply this tragedy was imbedded in people who live there. At that time
my uncle lived in Kharkiv. He was hiding from the Soviet authorities because he
had been well-to-do in his time, not by wealth but by talent. He learned soon
after the revolution how to drive a car and worked as a chauffeur. They
mobilizaed all transportation to pick up those the government was supposed to
take care of, like I described with the lady and infant. But he said there was
an order: "if you see that someone cannot make it on his own but he is still
living, put him in with the dead bodies". They put bodies of the dead and nearly
dead together.
Question: And your uncle was driving trucks?
Answer: Yes, because you couldn't refuse. If you refused you would be
arrested. Now I would like to talk about my father and how he survived Siberia
when they sent him there. In 1929 they took them to the railroad boxcar. The
boxcar was locked and there was a seal on that lock that nobody, nobody is
supported to open until it reached its destination. In his boxcar were 42
people. An eleven year-old child died. To reach the destination took several
days. With 42 people in the hot boxcar, the body began to decompose and smell.
The mother asked, 'please do something!' Everybody refused because they were
afraid. It was an impossible smell! They threw the body right on the proceeding
train in an open window. This is a fact. When they brought them to the taiga
there were no signs of any living villages or of anyone living there. They
unloaded, under command, when the temperature there was below 40 degrees (i.e.,
40 below zero - JM). This was in a complete wilderness. Those who were strong
enough to protect themselves from the cold survived until morning. A little
further from the train there was a wooded area and when they unloaded the train
people would try to run toward this wooded area to make a fire, but they were
prohibited. When they did this, they started to shoot. Somehow they survived
until morning. Sixty percent of the women and children were frozen by morning.
In the morning the survivors decided it didn't matter whether they died from
frost or from running to the forest. Somehow they brought branches from the
woods and started the fire. Those people who survived through the night tried to
build shacks to protect themselves. That is what they did with kulaks who fed,
historically, all of Europe, all of the Middle East and the Far East with the
wheat the Ukrainian produced. They exhausted those people. They squeezed the
small villager dry. There are cases, which I didn't see, when they found a few
pounds of wheat hidden in the walls ,then would take the mother and shoot her in
the yard and take the kids to where they died in a couple of months because of
conditions there. So that is what I remember very well. My brother came from
Siberia and had tuberculosis. He was in the hospital for two years under someone
else's name. He was only 15. my father taught my second brother that when he
went into the woods to chop wood to put his leg on the stump and slice it with
the ax so they might take him to the hospital where he might have a chance to
escape. At lunchtime people would slice a muscle, that is how tragic the
conditions were. When he was in the hospital he was able to get away and escape
on a ship. This is how I know everything they went through. Another brother also
died of tuberculosis. In 1933 I was in industrial areas, and you could see dead
bodies everywhere. If you went on a train you could see a head here, a hand
there. There is no greater tragedy that death by starvation. I was adopted in
1931 when my father decided to go to the хутір, a small village with land to
work on. Of course no child is supposed to get any education if he is a kulak
child. In 1934 I was in the city at that time and I went to a hospital morgue.
There was a hill – a heavy, heavy, big building full of dead bodies lying just
like wood! I looked at this and thought to myself: if any normal person knows
that I can look at the tragedy of these people, can they believe that I am still
a human being? Can they tell that I am a human being? I thought: if my father –
at which time he was still in Siberia and I had no connection with him – would
know that his daughter could see this tragedy and do nothing, what could he
think of me? Really, what I wanted to testify to is that starvation did not
start naturally. It was planned in Moscow, by the head of the country of Ukraine
who was Kaganovich, and it was systematically planned to destroy the population.
Because I saw the tragedy, how those people struggled to give that wheat, to
give that harvest yield to the government and how astronomical, astronomical was
what was demanded. People gave it, if they could, because those who failed to do
so were considered guilty and could be taken to Siberia, or to CHEKA or NKVD and
they would kill him.
Question: Ho sis you survive those years?
Answer: I survived because I was adopted. I was adopted by my
godmother. She had a son who was a teacher and she had a husband who was a
communist. He was captured in Germany as a soldier and was exposed to Marxist
philosophy, materialist philosophy, and he was killed during the revolution and
her son, too. She was always alone and as godmother she adopted me. On her
papers I did go pretty good. Of course, I was starving many times and would have
to eat horse meat, but to compared with what the general population and the
farmers had to go through, it's nothing. I was blessed. My mother and brother
escaped in 1936, after my father escaped. We were devout Christians, and when I
was leaving for the West my father said, "Don't cross the path of Christ".
Question: How is that phrase in Ukrainian?
Answer: Не
розминайся з Богом. Я пішла сюди, а ті пішли туди і ми розминулися, не бачили
одне другого. There was a Bible. My father always taught to do that your God
tells you and if you learn to live to help your neighbor, then you're a good
Christian. This is very important to know because some people don't know that my
people are so dedicated to Christ's way of life, and that is the reason why the
anti-Christian philosophy, conspiracy used everything with no psychological
gloves to just shock them.
Question: What happened with their church?
Answer: There was a church, a beautiful church, in my village where I
was born which is gone now. There was a custom that everybody went to church and
brought a flower to the center of the church to the spirit of Jesus' mother in
the presence of her picture, supposedly a more artistic heavenly expressioned
face of Jesus' mother. Everybody put one flower. Why did they tell us that we
were hateful people? One thing I must say because a lot of people do not
understand: why they didn't revolt. There was a custodian at the church. One
day, one of those communists came to church. The Orthodox church was very
graceful because the czar cared about the buildings. They took the custodian to
the highest point of the church where the bells are and they pushed him off. He
was killed when he reached the ground. How can you revolt? If you crossed the
street during the war, you had to show identification. The civilized world
doesn't publish that tourists have no right to go to villages. Most people do
not know this, and it has to be exposed. My nationality has an inferiority
complex, which is very, very deep-seated because when you were a farmer and
spoke Ukrainian, the government saw you as just the lowest, the lowest there is.
There was a czar who had saying: 'how can you lift people if you do not reach
them?' Washington said that He made the horizon for all my people, saying every
nation is supposed to be free, that it should have economic freedom, spiritual
freedom, cultural freedom, only then can a nation grow. I'll tell you what
happened to my mother-in-law when the GPU was searching for gold. She had long
hair when they called to investigate whether or not she had any gold. She said
she had none, but they terrorized her by trying her hair to the ceiling and
lifting her to the ceiling by her hair. They looked for that gold in her rectum
and vagina. This is what happened to my own mother-in-law. As I see it, I do
remember everything. When my father was a hostage I had to walk 19 miles to the
jail, when I was 6 years old. The communist Marxist international conspiracy
when it involves especially anti-Christian people, I see from day one in my
memory that it was planned. Our responsibility is to expose those people. My
husband was arrested, politically, in 1937. he was not a politician. He was just
a lover of young ladies. What happened was, when American bankers loaned a lot
of money they needed a lot of laborers in Siberia to dig the gold and give
Manhattan banks interest. My husband's four investigators terrified him there
for a year and eight days. They took them to the NKVD at eleven o'clock and
would send them back to the arrest area at four o'clock. His four investigators
were Jewish communists like Trotsky, Kaganovich, Yagoda. I can give you lists
and lists, if you want. We Ukrainians have our Khvyl'ovyi who was a communist in
CHEKA and we do not hide him. We expose him. The Jewish people, the Jewish
nation should also separate themselves from the communists. Marxism is a
humanity-killing philosophy. We have to crush every communist, materialist view
and put them out in the open to let people see them. We had Skrypnyk, we had
Khvyl'ovyi – he was CHEKA, he killed people, but we're not afraid to let people
know about him. The tragedy we went through, what those commissars did to my
people! Those commissars make Hitler look almost angelic by comparison! Germany
is next door. They did see salvation created in 1921, 1924. in 1933 it was a
disaster and those people next door did see it. For every poison there is an
anti-poison, and they created Hitler. Today, for me to see a communist party is
power anyplace is just the same as seeing Hitler's party in our Congress. It's
the same thing.
Question: You mentioned Skrypnyk. What did people
think about Skrypnyk?
Answer: I do believe that Skrypnyk believed in
Marxist philosophy. He did not see that there was a conspiracy. Afterwards he
was convinced that he was wrong. This is my feeling. Many, many people don't
feel this way. After he realized that he was on the wrong path and that he had
been watching him and that he would be arrested. Later, in 1936-1937, when
somebody knocked on their door, people were jumping down from many floors to
kill themselves so that the NKVD would not get to them. I know because I went to
my husband's jail every ten days to take him socks or soap and to make sure that
he was not yet in Siberia. His uncle was arrested because he tried to teach in
Ukrainian in school and sentenced for twenty-five years ,and no one saw or
communicated with him. They didn't let us. If you look at the census in 1900,
you see that the rate of growth very high. We should have doubled our
population, but we did not. We went from 45 millions to 36 millions. Our tragedy
is not only our tragedy, it's a tragedy to the whole world.