MEMORIES OF UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE WITNESSES
"Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter sent abroad in
the midst of the famine! In London, Berlin, Paris I could see ... people eating
butter stamped with a Soviet trade mark. Driving through the fields, I did not
hear the lovely Ukrainian songs so dear to my heart. These people have
forgotten how to sing! I could only hear the groans of the dying, and the lip-
smacking of the fat foreigners enjoying our butter..."
Victor Kravchenko - Former Soviet trade official and defector
"... On one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from
lack of food; on the other, soldiers, members of the GPU*carrying out the
instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the
country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had
shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had
reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert."
* GPU = Soviet secret police
Malcolm Muggeridge - British foreign correspondent - May 1933
"this famine may fairly be called political because it was not the result of any
overwhelming natural catastrophe or such complete exhaustions of the
country's resources in foreign or civil wars"
William Henry Chamberlin - Correspondent for the Christian Science
Monitor who was originally pro-Soviet. He was one of the few Westerners
who personally toured Ukraine during the Genocide of 1932-1933. Russia's
Iron Age (London, 1935) p. 82.
"...(Our reporting) served Moscow's purpose of smearing the facts out of
recognition and declaring the situation which, had we reported simply and
clearly, might have worked up enough public opinion abroad to force
remedial measures. And every correspondent each in his own measure, was
guilty of collaborating in this monstrous hoax on the world."
Eugene Lyons - Moscow United Press correspondent from 1928 - 1934.
Assignment in Utopia, p. 573.
Experiences of Ukrainian Genocide Survivors:
This was the first instance of a peacetime genocide in history. It took the
extraordinary form of an artificial famine deliberately created by the ruling
powers. The savage combination of words for the designation of a crime - an
artificial deliberately planned famine - is still incredible to many people
throughout the world, but indicates the uniqueness of the tragedy of 1933,
which is unparalleled, for a time of peace, in the number of victims it claimed."
Wasyl Hryshko - Genocide Survivor, 1933
"They were horrible years! Mothers were slicing their children and sticking
them in pots to cook them, and then ate them. My mother went into the field
where some horses were dying and brought back a horse's head. About five
women bit into this horse's head. What a horror it was; people were dropping
dead on the road. If you pierced them the blood was like water. So many
people died. I remember every thing in the village, including the time they
took the crosses off the churches. Two members from the Komsomol
(Communist Youth Organization) went up and took the crosses down. They
buried them two meters into the ground and old women would go to kiss that
plot of ground...
Then they filled the wooden church full of wheat. During the night mice made
their way through the walls, leaving little holes from which women filled their
buckets with the wheat. The Komsomol took the wheat from the church, and
afterward it stood empty. So many people died in the village that in the
cemetery they stopped putting up crosses. During the winter an old woman
would take a cross from the cemetery to make a fire in her house so that her
children would not freeze."
Nina Popovych - Genocide Survivor - born 1925, Lysycha Balka, Ukraine
- from Irene Antonovych and Lialia Kuchma's Generations: A Documentary
of Ukrainians in Chicago, p. 32
"In 1932 and 1933 Kyiv seemed like a paradise to nearly villagers who had
been stripped of all they had by the Soviet government. A no wonder: some
villages were dying out completely, except for those who still had the courage
and strength to flee. There were cases where mothers had gone mad and
killed a child to feed the rest of the family. So, thousands of villagers flocked
to the city of Kyiv. Many of the weak ones sat or lay down by buildings or
fences, most never to get up again. Trucks driven by policemen or
Communist Youth League members, mobilized for that purpose, went around
picking up bodies or carrying those still alive somewhere outside the city
limits. It was especially terrible to see mothers whose faces had turned black
from hunger with children who no longer cry, but only squeal, moving their
lips in an attempt to find sustenance where there was none. People sought
salvation and found death. I saw these things as I walked to work through
the Haymarket on Pidvil'na Street near the Golden Gates and Volodymyr
Street."
Varvara Dibert - Genocide Survivor - from Congressional testimony
presented before the United States Ukraine Famine Commission in
Washington, DC, October 8, 1986.
"The spring of 1933 was the most horrible and tragic moment in the history of
the Ukrainian people. In th fall of 1932 and the early winter of 1933 the
Russian Communist government had taken away the entire grain crop and all
food produce from the Ukrainian farmers in order to bring them into
submission and obedient servitude in the collective farms.
In the collective farms of my native district, which numbered 672 people, 164
died that fatal spring of 1933. Actually this collective farm suffered little
compared with all the surrounding places, for to induce the farmers to remain
there, they were given 300 grams of bread per person baked from all kinds
of chaff and some liquid concoction cooked from refuse. But there were
villages and hamlets where not a single person remained alive. For instance,
in the large village of Chemychyna, in Neforoshchanske County, which
stretched for two and a half miles, though I do not recall it's population, and
the hamlet Rybky, of the Sukho-Mayachka village administration, where 60%
of the population died.
Here is another of the many incidents of the famine:
In my native village, there was a stallion kept for breeding mares. He was
well fed, receiving 13 pounds of oats daily, but for some unknown reason, he
suddenly died. This happened at the end of May 1933. This district
administration forbid the stallion to be buried, until a special commission
arrived and held an inquest.
The dead stallion lay in the open for three days and began to decay. A
guard was appointed to shield it from the starving people who would have
eaten the meat. On the fourth day the commission arrived and, having
completed the investigation, ordered the stallion to be buried.
No sooner was that done and the commission gone, then like an avalanche,
the people descended on the dead, decaying stallion and, in an instant,
nothing was left of him. Violent arguments ensued, because some had
grabbed more than their share.
A spectacle I shall never forget was when a 16 year old boy who, beside his
stepmother, was the only survivor in the family, and swollen from starvation,
crawled up to the place where the dead stallion had been and finding a hoof,
snatched it in both hands and gnawed at it furiously. The boy was never
seen again, and rumors circulated, that he had been eaten by his
stepmother.
It was forbidden for people to leave their villages. GPU* guards blocked all
roads and railways. Any food that farmers happened to be carrying was
taken away from them. For picking a stray head of wheat or a frozen potato
or beet left behind in the field, a person was sentenced to ten years in prison
or concentration camp, according to the ruling passed by the government
August 7, 1932.
Ukrainian Genocide Famine Foundation - USA Witness and Survivor Recollections