by Miron Dolot
Gold fever resulted in the complete destruction of our cemetery. Our village was very old; its beginnings dated back to the sixteenth century. Through all those three centuries or more, our cemetery had been the burial place for people from all walks of life: the prominent and rich as well as the common farmer. It was the custom to bury the dead with all their personal possessions such as jewelry, weapons, and crosses. Now, the graves were opened and looted of all the valuables they contained. At first, the grave plundering took place secretly at night, but soon, it was done openly in broad daylight. There actually was no need of hiding this horrendous crime for the government did not mind the pillaging of graves. Nobody was ever punished for this crime as far as I know. The cemeteries, after all, were looked upon as a part of religious tradition, something the Communists were bent on destroying. So, like the church and the independent farmers, our cemetery had to go; grave robberies were officially ignored and tolerated, if not actually encouraged.
In many cases, the remains of the buried were desecrated after the graves had been dug up. One could see human skulls and bones scattered all over the cemetery, and the plots which once held them were torn up, leaving empty, gaping holes. Even the wooden crosses marking the graves were carried off and used as firewood.
The cemetery looting turned out to be of some use: the opened graves soon received new bodies; the victims of starvation. This was a bizarre stroke of good fortune, since the starving villagers did not have sufficient strength to dig new graves for their dead relatives and neighbors. Now they only had to drag their bodies to the cemetery and drop them into the looted open graves.
There were a few villagers who had some pieces of precious metal in hiding and could realize their dream of trading it for food. We happened to be among those lucky ones. One evening my mother revealed her secret to us: she had two gold medallions. They had been her parents’ presents to her when she was still single, some half century ago, or more than thirty years before the October Revolution. At that time, it was the fashion for young women to wear gold coins as medallions. Mother no longer wore her most precious possessions, but kept them well-hidden for a rainy day. Even her children, knew nothing of their existence. We were in the direst of straits. The famine by this time was reaching its height; we had to have some food if we were to stay alive. Mother asked us, as she always did in important matters, as to the best way, in our opinion, to utilize these medallions. We decided unanimously that we should take one of them to the closest Torgsin in the county capital. We agreed to make this trip as soon as possible, for the snow had not yet sealed off our village completely. Later on, the intensity of the winter elements would make it impossible for us to leave the village at all.
One morning in late January 1933, while it was still dark, Mother and I set out along the main street through the center of the village for the county town. We followed the street to the main road which led straight into the town.
It was a memorable trip. Soon the sun rose and started to shine in all its brilliance in the vast blue sky with the white snow cover reflecting its light. The landscape was very calm and silent. We met nothing that was alive: there were no birds, cats, or dogs; not even their traces in the snow signaling life. And we didn’t meet a single human being. I had the eerie sensation that we were indeed walking in the kingdom of death.
The only sign that people were still alive was the smoke rising from distant chimneys. However, not many houses showed this signal. The majority of them, buried in deep snow drifts, hid the horrible sight of their inhabitants suffering and dying from starvation.
Soon, however, as we slowly made our way through the snow toward the village center, graphic evidence of starvation became visible. We noticed a black object which, from afar, looked like a snow-covered tree stump. As we came near, however, we saw that it was the body of a dead man. Frozen limbs protruding from under the snow gave the body the appearance of some grotesque creature. I bent down and cleared the snow off the face. It was Ulas, our elderly neighbor whom we had last seen about a month ago.
A few steps further, we saw another frozen body. It was the corpse of a woman. As I brushed away the snow, horror made my blood turn cold: under her ragged coat, clutched tightly to her bosom with her stiff hands, was the frozen little body of her baby.
We finally left our village behind and stepped onto the open road which led to the county seat. However, another ghostly panorama now opened in front of us. Everywhere we looked dead and frozen bodies lay by the sides of the road. To our right were bodies of those villagers who apparently had tried to reach the town in search of work and food. Weakened by starvation, they were unable to make it and ended up lying or falling down by the roadside, never to rise again. The gentle snow mercifully covered their bodies with its white blanket.
One could easily imagine the fate of those people whose bodies were lying to our left. They most probably were returning from the county town, without having accomplished anything. They had tramped many kilometers in vain, only to be refused a job and a chance to stay alive. They were returning home empty-handed. Death caught up with them as they trudged homeward, resigned to dying in their village.
The wide open kolhosp fields, stretching for kilometers on both sides of the main road, looked like a battlefield after a great war. Littering the fields were the bodies of the starving farmers who had been combing the potato fields over and over again in the hope of finding at least a fragment of a potato that might have been overlooked or left over from the last harvest. They died where they collapsed in their endless search for food. Some of those frozen corpses must have been lying out there for months. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to cart them away and bury them.
The actual seven miles’ distance to the town proved to be very laborious for us. After we left our village, a cold wind started blowing from the north, and clouds appeared on the horizon. It was difficult, especially for Mother, to walk against the wind, but we stubbornly persisted, and after about six hours of struggle with the wind and snow-covered road, we arrived at the entrance to the county town. Here yet another horror awaited us.
Our county seat at that time had no sewage system, and the raw sewage was collected, usually at night, by a special sanitary brigade. There was no special dumping ground for the cargo of the horse-drawn sewage tanks. They were usually emptied outside of town, along the sides of the roads. The road from our village to the county seat seemed to have been their favorite dumping ground; consequently, both sides of the road for a considerable stretch were thickly covered with raw sewage. This was in itself, a most distasteful sight and unpleasant in normal times, but we had become used to it. Now, as we slowly trudged along these littered roadsides, our stomachs turned over anew. Scattered here and there throughout the sewage were frozen corpses. They were lying singly or in groups, or just piled up one on top of another, like debris after a disaster. Some were covered with snow, showing only arms and legs protruding; others were covered by freshly dumped raw sewage. The infants were invariably pressed to their mothers’ bosoms under the cover of homemade coats.
These dead were farmers from the neighboring villages and their families, all victims of starvation. Deprived of all means of existence, the farmers saw their only chance of survival in escaping to the city where they hoped to find some job, some food, and some help. Despite the prohibitions on leaving the boundaries of their villages, they moved in throngs to the county seat, swelling and annoying its population and the city management. They appeared on the doorsteps of houses, begging for a crumb of bread, or even a piece of potato peel, usually in vain. The city inhabitants, with their own meager food rations, could not give the villagers sufficient food to save them from starvation. There were simply too many of them. They were standing or lying in the city streets, in the marketplaces, at the railroad stations, under fences, in backyards, in the ditches by the streets and roads. They became such everyday sights that the city people mostly passed them by, ignoring them and their pleas. Th
us, after fruitlessly trying everything and going everywhere, the villagers and their families met their inevitable deaths. The dead lay undiscovered or ignored for days, like driftwood.
Often the starving people would be rounded up like cattle by the militiamen, taken beyond the city limits, and left to their fate. The dead, and those barely alive and unable to walk anymore, were all loaded onto trucks or horse-driven carts, and hauled away somewhere outside the city limits. They were dumped into ravines or in the dumping grounds for sewage along the roadsides. Weren’t these people entitled to at least a decent burial in the cemetery, even in common graves?
When mother and I finally arrived at the Torgsin, there was already a great crowd of starving people there. Emaciated and skeletonlike, or with swollen, puffed-up bodies, human beings stood around in the streets, leaned against the telephone poles and walls, or lay on the sidewalks and in the street gutters. They were patiently waiting for some merciful shoppers to share a pittance of their purchases with them. Others were begging noisily, shouting and crying; the rest held out their hands quietly and silently. Here and there among the crowds we could see rigid bodies of the dead, but nobody paid any attention to them….
We were informed at the entrance to the Torgsin that all shoppers were required to first go to the office across the street for an appraisal of their valuables. Having found the office, we were directed to an official inside. The official, a fat man behind iron grates, took Mother’s medallion without even looking at us, weighed it quickly, and tossed it into a drawer. He then handed us a form, requiring our name, address, and the type of our valuable. Afterwards, we received a receipt indicating the sum we were authorized to spend: exactly 18 rubles. Another hour passed as we stood in line waiting to enter the Torgsin. Finally we were inside.
What a sight it was. I could not believe my eyes; it was like a dream. Here was everything we needed and more. There were things we had never even heard of nor seen in our lives. There were even groceries known to me only from books I had read. All the items were tastefully arranged and exhibited in cases under glass. Looking at these splendid assortments of foods, I began to feel dizzy. For months, I hadn’t even seen ordinary food. I had forgotten the taste of real bread. Now, everywhere I looked were these wonderful things to eat.
I was completely overcome by hunger pangs; they were so violent that I could hardly manage to stand upright. Savage hunger gnawed at my stomach, and there was a choking sensation in my throat, as if someone’s hands were squeezing and twisting my neck. In my agony, I was about to burst out crying, but at that moment, I felt my mother’s hands on my shoulders. She understood my emotional state. Perhaps she felt the same way. As I looked at her, she smiled at me and said: “Have some pride, my son!” These words calmed me and gave me strength to overcome the physical weakness.
We decided to buy only the basic and most essential products, so, when our turn came at the counter, we quickly selected what we needed without much hesitation and difficulty. We bought some butter, salt pork, lard, two loaves of bread, sugar, and a few miscellaneous items to make up exactly 18 rubles. Most of these items were neatly packed in cans, boxes or bags. To our astonishment, we discovered that the labels on all of them bore the trade mark “Made in USSR,” meaning they were destined for foreign markets.
After we finished shopping, we left the store as unobtrusively as possible and started our trip back home. We did not fear robbers during daylight, for we were in the same position as the rest of the starving villagers, and moreover, looked like them: thin and haggard, dressed in rags, with beggars’ sacks on our shoulders. No one in his right mind would have suspected that in those potato sacks we carried a few pounds of salt pork and other staples which to us were the greatest treasures on earth.
Already on the way home, we could not resist the temptation to eat some of the bread and salt pork. It tasted heavenly. Mother suggested that we not eat too much for fear we would become sick. Now it was getting dark, and we were afraid to walk home the same way we had come. Consequently, we decided to go to a railroad station in the hope of catching a train to a station just three miles away from our village. This would shorten our walking distance and it would keep us in a safer populated area.
As we approached the station, a freight train slowly passed to our right. We noticed people gathered around something on the tracks. We joined them, and saw a pile of mangled human bodies in a pool of blood. Somebody said that it was a suicide; a woman carrying a child had jumped under the oncoming train. The onlookers began leaving the scene one by one, and the crushed bodies of the mother and her child remained lying there without any further attention. No one shed a tear or showed any emotion for their tragic end; all were too numb.
We walked to the station building. There were great crowds of people there also, both inside and out. They had come, as did all of us, from the surrounding villages. This was their last hope to find some food. They hoped that some sympathetic traveler would throw them a piece of bread from the train window. Some had hopes of finding a job. Still others brought with them the best of their belongings with the prospect of exchanging them for food, or selling them for money. They sat patiently on the cement floor of the platform, wet from snow, exhibiting their wares: beautifully hand-embroidered Ukrainian national costumes made of homespun materials, along with homemade richly embroidered tablecloths, embroidered towels, handwoven rugs. Some of them had been kept in trunks or in the hopechests of women for decades or even centuries as family heirlooms. But these valuable articles found no buyers at this time. Very few passenger trains passed by, and local people were not interested in buying anything but food. Except for Party and government officials, and black marketeers, all were hungry or starving.
Most of those who were crowding the station’s waiting hall inside were trying to buy tickets somewhere north of Ukraine, to Russia, where there was no famine. But their efforts were futile. Train tickets to Russia were officially prohibited to Ukrainian farmers with few exceptions. Only those with special certificates permitting them to leave the collective farm for a specific place could buy a train ticket to Russia. Nevertheless, the starving people tried their luck. They had nothing more to lose and nothing else to do, especially now that the fields, rivers, and forests were covered with deep snow. As a result, they flocked to the railroad stations because each train was bringing some ray of hope, some good news. Above all, there was the possibility that in spite of all prohibitions, one would somehow be able to board the train to the north. They kept dreaming of the impossible. They had thoughts of traveling on the roof of the train, or underneath the railroad car, on the steps, on buffer platforms, and on the bumpers.
But, for the most part, these dreams were never realized. The crowds in and around the railroad stations would be rounded up periodically by the militia and GPU men, loaded onto trucks like stray animals, and dumped somewhere outside the town limits.
We had better luck in obtaining train tickets because we were going south, not north. Soon we were on our way home, but the horror pictures of starvation were not over.
There were very few people in the car we entered as there wasn’t much traffic to the south—to the interior of Ukraine. There were many vacant places, and soon after we occupied our seats, a woman entered our compartment followed by two small emaciated boys. What a pitiful sight they were! Their faces were skin and bones; their eyes were bulging, dull, and listless. They were unkempt; their clothes were ragged and dirty.
After they sat down, I noticed that the woman held a baby under her coat at her bosom, and that the baby was dead.
“It’s a girl,” she said quietly, without showing any emotion. “She died yesterday. My poor baby; she was hungry, and kept crying…and then suddenly she stopped…. We stayed overnight outside. They threw us out of the waiting hall. It was very cold. The boys huddled under my coat like chicks under their mother hen….”
We didn’t know what to say and just kept watching her silently and with s
ympathy.
She put her dead baby on her knees and started to unwrap the dirty rags in which it was bundled. Then, as if realizing that the baby was dead, she bundled it up again, held it tightly to herself, and pressed her cheeks affectionately against the baby’s cold and rigid face. She started crying and talking to her dead baby:
“I am sorry…” she sobbed, tears rolling down her face and dropping onto the baby, “It’s not my fault. Heavens, I tried; I did all I could…. They labeled me an enemy of the people…. They threw us out wherever we went.” Then she started kissing her baby tenderly, its eyes, its forehead, its cheeks.
“Don’t worry, my baby, you won’t be alone for long; soon we’ll follow you; soon you will be again with your Mama and your brothers….”
Mother could not listen to her lament any longer, and afraid of bursting out crying in front of her, she got up and started towards the door, motioning me to follow her. Once in the corridor, she gave vent to her emotions. Crying, she asked me to cut three pieces of bread and give it to the woman and her boys. We returned to the compartment and I handed the bread to them. Words cannot describe the sensation the sight of bread made for these starved human beings.
After eating half of her portion of bread, and saving the rest for her boys, the woman calmed down somewhat and was able to tell us her sad story more coherently. It was a typical story of other Ukrainian families of that time, but incomprehensible to those who did not live through those experiences of suffering and tragedy.
