by Miron Dolot
Priska’s fate was not much different from that of many of the unfortunate villagers’ families. For refusing to join the collective farm in 1930, and then failing to meet the state taxes and delivery quotas, her husband was labeled a kurkul and banished like many others to a distant notorious concentration camp. Later on, her husband was interned in a forced labor camp from which news reached Priska that he had died while digging the Baltic Sea-White Sea Canal. Priska was left alone with her two children: a boy about seven and a five-year-old daughter.
Priska was at home when we reached her place. She was famished to such a degree that she could hardly move. She told us her sad story laboriously since it was already difficult for her to talk.
Left alone, she had to work hard to support her children. Her work consisted mainly of running around searching for food. There was not much she could find: a couple of beets, a few potatoes, a slice or two of bread. Still, it was not so bad during the summer and autumn when she was able to work at the collective farm. While working there, she received two pounds of either bread or flour. In addition, she, like the rest of the kolhosp members who were able to work, received two hot meals daily. It was usually some kind of millet or buckwheat gruel or porridge. With her food rations, she was also able to feed her children, but when winter came work stopped at the kolhosp, and her bread rations and hot meals also ceased. The small amount of food that she had received as payment in kind for her labor didn’t last very long. Nevertheless, she and her children managed somehow to stay alive until March. Then came the inevitable: her son succumbed to starvation. She buried him in the orchard under a cherry tree. She also wished to be buried under a cherry tree after her death.
Now left with her little daughter, Maria, she knew that soon it would be their turn to die. She was afraid of the possibility that she would die first, leaving her young daughter all alone. That thought was unbearable to Priska; she had to do something to save little Maria from that fate. She had heard rumors about a Children’s Shelter in a town about twenty miles from our village. One April morning, the two of them started their twenty-mile journey on foot. Arriving at the so-called Children’s Shelter, she discovered that it was a Militia Detention Home for Children. Even though she was frightened, disappointed, and frustrated with this turn of events, she decided that even that place would be better than caring for her child alone. After thinking very carefully, she instructed little Maria what she should do and say and sent her to the entrance door. As soon as the door was opened and little Maria entered, Priska disappeared around the street corner, never to see her little daughter again.
At this point in her story, Priska became silent. Her bulging glassy eyes had a stunned look, and her lips trembled, but she did not cry. We just stood there watching her silently.
After Priska regained her composure, she completed her story. She had no peace in her heart after giving up Maria and leaving her to an unknown destiny. She was heartbroken and had feelings of great guilt and remorse. She could not stop the tears from flowing. During the long cold sleepless nights, in her hallucinations little Maria would appear before her. Sitting down on the bench in the corner under the icons, Priska could sense her staring at her. Then Maria would burst out crying, begging for bread and saying:
“Mama, why have you abandoned me? Don’t you love me anymore?”
Each night her little daughter would appear, Priska said, and each time she would ask her the same question:
“Mama, why have you abandoned me? Don’t you love me anymore?”
Finally, in her frenzied state, she walked those twenty miles again to where she had left Maria. Her efforts were in vain, and she never did see her again.
It was growing dark by the time Priska finished her story, and we had to leave for home. The next day, Mother sent us back to Priska’s house with some food, but it was too late. We found her dead on the floor. In her despondency, she chose to die a quicker, less agonizing death. She mustered all her remaining strength to poison herself by inhaling charcoal fumes.
We remembered her desire to be buried under a cherry tree, and at nightfall we buried her close to her young son.
Such suicides became a common occurrence in our village at that time. Many people took their lives by carbon monoxide poisoning like Priska did. It was simple and painless. Those who decided on such a step were mostly women whose husbands had been arrested and sent to concentration camps, and who had lost their children in their heroic struggle with starvation. They would seal the chimneys, the doors, and windows, make a fire in the oven or in the middle of the room on the mud floor, and die from the deadly fumes. Others would set the whole house on fire.
But the most common form of suicide was by hanging. Among those who chose this way were the village functionaries, especially the leaders of the Tens and Fives. Some members of the Communist Party also committed suicide in one way or another. The authorities were aware of these mass suicides, but did nothing to stop them.
During the following days, we visited other relatives and friends about whom we were anxious. Anything could have happened to them since we last saw them.
First, we stopped at my friend Vasyl’s house. His father had been arrested and banished to some northern region. He had lived with his mother and two little sisters, but we had heard nothing from him since he had dropped out of school sometime in December of last year. As we entered the house, we saw the two famished girls and their mother. All three of them looked like living mummies. They were crouched silently in the middle of the room on the mud floor. They were cooking weeds, orach and nettle, which grew abundantly in our region. The girls left our greetings unanswered. All their attention was concentrated on the bubbling liquid in the pot. They watched it greedily, with spoons in their hands. The mother started weeping upon seeing us. It took us quite a while to calm her down so she could answer our inquiries about Vasyl, and then she told us his story.
At the onset of the famine, Vasyl had joined some men experienced in traveling to distant places. He went with them to Russia to buy food. He was lucky. He returned home with several loaves of bread and about thirty pounds of flour. That was last December. In March of 1933, when the famine reached its most disastrous proportions, Vasyl decided to repeat his trip, but this time he was not so lucky. He somehow managed to catch a train to a small Russian town not far from Moscow. From there, he was able to inform his mother in some way that he was on his way home. However, he never returned. His mother later learned that he had been arrested at a border railroad station, and eventually tried as a black marketeer, convicted, and given a sentence of five years of hard labor. No one had heard from him since.
There were many cases like Vasyl’s. Despite the official prohibition against travel in search of jobs and food, and in spite of our miserable living conditions and the fact that we were practically in a state of collapse from hunger, we couldn’t simply give up. No one who could still stand wanted to resign himself to death without a struggle.
There was no attempt of any kind to organize some relief for the starving families in our village either by the authorities or by private individuals. On the contrary, when a local teacher tried to put some relief in motion, he was arrested and sent to dig the Baltic Sea—White Sea Canal. He was accused of “spreading false rumors that our villagers were starving.” The idea of organized relief vanished together with him. We were on our own to fight the disaster individually without the benefit of social organization. The mass exodus of the villagers was not only to neighboring towns and cities. Many, like Vasyl, went to farther regions and even to Russia where there was no famine. It was not easy to do, even if one had money. As I’ve noted before, we were not allowed to buy train tickets, except when we had special permission from the village soviet. In 1933, the ordinance was being enforced much more strictly. The trains were guarded by soldiers of the special forces, and it was impossible to sneak onto a train without showing a ticket. Besides that, the villagers did not have the passports which
had been introduced the previous December, so it was easier to check all passengers traveling north or east from Ukraine and catch the “illegal” ones. Anyone caught was forcibly returned to his village or sent to a labor camp.
This was an ideal time for the city black marketeers. With their personal passports, they could buy train tickets for travel wherever they wanted to without any difficulties. Then they in turn could resell the ticket to a villager for an exorbitant price. A ticket to Moscow on the black market, for example, would usually cost four or five times as much as its original price.
CHAPTER 29
MOST OF our attempts to find help outside the village were doomed to failure. Wherever a Ukrainian farmer turned up to seek food outside his village, he was hunted like a wild animal. We were forced to forage for our own food from nature.
The lucky and skillful might catch a fish or a bird. Others would try to satisfy their hunger with the tender juicy parts of the abundant river plants and vegetables. The forest offered the hungry its berries, mushrooms, all kinds of roots, and even the leaves and bark of bushes and trees. There was game in abundance too for those with expertise in catching or trapping. But we had no hunting weapons, since all guns had been confiscated long ago.
The fields were the favorite places for foraging. There one had the hope of finding something, mainly root vegetables from last year’s crop, preserved by the winter snow and frost. Potatoes, beets, and onions were priceless for the starving people, even if frozen. “A starving man does not sniff his food,” says the old adage.
As soon as the snow had melted, one could see the miserable figures of the hungry wading in the watery fields in search of something edible. The best find was potatoes. Often those who found them didn’t eat them right then and there, but brought them home and made a kind of potato pancake, mixing them with leaves or even bark.
However, it wasn’t an easy task for people weakened by hunger to wander around in the fields hunting for vegetables. Just to reach the faraway areas required strength and stamina, and many could not make it. Even if they succeeded, many fell dead in the fields from exhaustion before finding anything.
One afternoon, the mother of my school friend Petro came to see us. Crying, she told us that Petro was dying in the field, about two miles from our village. A neighbor who had returned from her frozen potato field trip brought her the news. She had seen Petro in his distress, but was not strong enough to help him. Petro’s mother pleaded with us to help her bring him home, dead or alive.
The story of Petro’s family was no different from that of many other villagers. His father had refused to join the kolhosp, as had all the farmers at first. But the government officials were persistent and used every trick and means to destroy him as an individual farmer. Two years ago, he was appointed leader of a Five. That meant that his house became a meeting place for five farmers and he was fully responsible for them before the government. As the government pressed the farmers to join the collective farm, he had to collectivize all the farmers who belonged to his Five, and, of course, he had to be the first to join the collective farm.
This trick worked well in many instances, but not in the case of Petro’s father. He and the members of his Five loathed the collective farm, and wanted to stay away from it, but he paid dearly for his stubbornness. Petro’s farm was overtaxed, and when he could not meet the tax quota in kind and money, he was arrested as an “enemy of the people” and disappeared somewhere into the Russian north. His farm was confiscated, and his wife and two young children had to move into her parents’ home.
Misfortune followed his wife there too. During the spring of 1932, her parents and her young daughter starved to death, leaving her alone with Petro.
Now, after both of them had somehow managed to survive that famine, young Petro was dying somewhere out there alone in the field.
We could not refuse Petro’s mother’s pathetic please for help, although we ourselves hardly had sufficient strength to stand on our own feet. However, Petro was our friend and neighbor, and since there were no men around in our neighborhood who could help or risk the trip to the field then, we decided to do what we could to rescue Petro.
The only means of transportation we had to bring Petro home was a pushcart, since our horse and wagon had been confiscated two years ago. Taking the cart, Mykola and I headed for the potato field, followed by Petro’s mother, who insisted on accompanying us. We took a field road which, at that time of the year, was very muddy and in many places covered by pools of water coated with icy slush. Our footwear, if one could call it that, was completely inadequate for such a road. Petro’s mother had her feet wrapped in rags; Mykola and I had some old worn and torn shoes wrapped in pieces of tarpaulin. The heavy tarlike mud stuck to our footwear and made it difficult for us to walk. To add to our problems, crossing the mud puddles ankle deep, our footwear got soaked through by the icy, muddy water, making the trip more hazardous and extremely difficult. Petro’s mother, who was trying to keep up with us, could not humanly follow our pace, but sobbing quietly insisted she had no intention of returning to the village; she still lived in the hope of seeing her son alive. Mykola and I decided to put her on the pushcart and tried desperately to pull her. However, she was too heavy for the size of the cart, and, realizing she was holding us up by her persistence, she got off, and we yielded to her wishes to leave her behind.
As we continued our way to the field, we found two dead bodies. As we reached a shallow depression between two hills, my brother spotted an object lying in a furrow, a few feet off the road. We left the cart, and went to see it. We discovered a man’s body lying face down in the mud. There were no signs of a struggle. Apparently the man had fallen down and was just too weak to get up. He must have died quite a while ago and his body had lain there under the snow during the entire winter. We tried to turn the body over to see his face, but we could not. It was still frozen and stuck to the ground.
At this point Petro’s mother had caught up with us, and upon seeing the corpse she let out a loud cry but avoided getting near it. She urged us to keep on going and to hurry.
Naturally, she was unable to keep up our pace which we were doubling now, so we left her as we hurried on. Evening was approaching and heavy clouds began descending from the horizon onto the fields. Far away it was pouring rain and we could watch the storm slowly moving in our direction.
Yet we were delayed again. After trudging for about half a mile, a few feet off the road we spied the body of a woman whom we recognized. Her death, however, wasn’t caused by starvation. We could see instantly that she had been killed by a shotgun. She lay there on her back in a pool of blood mixed with mud, and her eyes seemed to be staring at us blankly. Apparently she had met her death quite recently. I tried to figure out what had happened to her. Her assailant could not have been an individual crazed by hunger like someone who would kill for a few frozen potatoes. No ordinary villagers had guns; only officials and guardsmen were in possession of arms. So it was most probable that the woman had been shot by a kolhosp field guard for foraging on the kolhosp potato field.
As before, we had to leave the body behind us and move on. The rain was coming nearer, and it was growing dark. We strained with all our might to get to the place where we hoped to find Petro. When we finally arrived, panting and perspiring, we found him. He was lying in the road still alive and breathing slowly. The long track behind him told us that he had crawled for quite a distance in the mud before he had passed out.
We somehow managed to put him on our cart with his feet hanging over the edge as he was too big for it. Our way back was even more difficult as it had started raining. We inched our way through the mud, pushing the cart with our heavy load.
We were expecting to meet Petro’s mother and we started worrying about her when she did not show up on the road. After a while we found her. She was lying in the mud, unable to move any farther. She had apparently also lost her speech. She just stared at us with her wide eyes. We wer
e frightened, for we could see that her death was imminent. However, she made a slight movement, signaling to us that she wanted to see her son. We lifted her to her feet. With our help, she reached the cart, but then she fell on it with all her weight. This was an impossible situation. There was no way we could have pulled or pushed the cart with both of them on it since Mykola and I were at the point of exhaustion.
As if sensing our plight, Petro’s mother slowly raised her head and tried to say something, but she could not. She slid down from the cart, and slightly lifting her right hand, she pointed at Petro. We understood that she wanted us to leave her behind while we hurried with her son to the village. She still hoped we could save him.
We left her there, intending to return for her later, and hurried home with Petro as fast as we could in spite of the bad weather and our waning strength. It was pitch black when we finally reached home, and raining heavily. Mother was very relieved to see us and with her help we brought Petro inside.
Not stopping to rest, we set out to bring Petro’s mother back for she could not last out there in the dark for long. Mother had decided to go back with us, so she wrapped Petro, who was still breathing slowly but evenly, in some warm clothing, gave him some broth to drink, and made him comfortable. Then we left the house, taking the cart with us again.
We found Petro’s mother alive but unconscious. After placing her on the cart, we headed slowly homeward with our heavy load. It was impossible to see the road in the darkness and pouring rain, and we often had to wade through pools of water. Our cart turned over several times, throwing Petro’s mother into the mud, but we never gave up. Drenched to the skin, we finally made it home where Mother, soaking wet herself, hastened to put dry clothes on Petro’s mother, while Mykola and I turned our attention to Petro. We wanted to change his clothing too, but bending over him, we discovered that he had died. We all made Petro’s mother as comfortable as we could, but she never regained consciousness and she died in terrible convulsions. We were sad, but also glad that at least they had not succumbed in the mud and pouring rain that dark night.
