Case History UFRC01

Б.О.М., anonymous female narrator, b. ca. 1924 in Poltava region, the eldest of 3 children of a farmer-blacksmith. That the village had 5 churches before collectivization is an indication of its size. 3 of the churches were destroyed during collectivization. At the time of the famine, the children were aged 8, 5, and 2 1/2. Narrator's father opposed collectivization, after the August 1932 harvest was arrested and released only after promising to join the collective farm, then went into hiding. Then a brigade of men and women came with a cart, bags, shovels, and brooms, taking all the grain, flour, and beans, with the women sweeping up any stray grains. Thus, by fall there was nothing to eat. The family searched the chaff to try to find stray grain. The father went into the woods to gather acorns and to the river to gather greens. Potatoes and sugar beets, which he had buried in the spring, quickly ran out. Brigades came with sharp pikes and poked everywhere to find buried food and seized what they found, also taking the horse and cow. The father's smithy was dismantled and taken to the kolhosp. Once two activists came, found the father at home, and demanded he give grain to the state. One started choking and cursing the father. After the father beat them up, he fled, leaving his wife and children, changed his name, and sought work. The militsiia continued to come in the middle of the night, pound on the door, and search the house. The activists smashed the family's hand mill. By the beginning of 1933 there was absolutely nothing to eat, and narrator's mother began to sell everything left in the house. By spring the father came very seldom. The mother, frantic to save her children, hunted rotten potatoes, potato skins, and other refuse that might be cooked and eaten. Then the mother was forced to guard the prison, leaving the children alone. Narrator went up to the attic and pulled out some new chaff from when her father last thatched the roof and searched the for a few grains, then did the same on the floor. The mother came home with some greens and a handful of grain, which they ground by rubbing one stone with another. Later the mother was ordered to pick up dead bodies for common burial as punishment for her husband's escape. Narrator's aunt Khrystia arrived from another village, saying everyone had died there. Narrator's mother had no food to give her sister. The latter then went out to the garden to try to find some greens, laid down, and died there. At that time there were no coffins. Everyone was swollen from hunger, and among narrator's neighbors whole streets died out. "In one house, the mother ate her two children." When she died, the children's bones were found in the oven. In the fall of 1933 the father came home one night and told his wife to close up the house and seek work in order to survive. The 2 boys were taken to stay with their grandmother, while narrator was taken in by her mother's sister. This aunt's husband and 2 children had died in the famine, but she still had a son. They joined the collective farm and were given a miserable ration. At her aunt's insistence, she begged from the Party members as did many other village children. Narrator avoided empty houses for fear of being caught by cannibals who sold human meat in the marketplaces. In late January 1934, narrator's mother took her to a state farm where she worked 80 km. away and was able to steal from the pigs in order get enough to eat, living in a house with 8 other women. The mother was entitled to eat in a communal dining hall where she got a bowl of soup and 300 g. of bread, but narrator could not. In the spring they returned home to find that narrator's father had taken his 2 sons to live with him in an unknown town. Narrator's mother then joined the kolhosp. They were given something to eat once a day, but many were still too weak from lack of food to work. The child was placed in the kolhosp kindergarten, where there the food was very bad, but the children were given soup and 100 g. of bread thrice daily. Famine lasted to mid-1934. The father never returned. Narrator and mother remained in abject poverty. Narrator also discusses village arrests in 1937-1938.

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