Testimony  Fromholod 33
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TRANSLATION/TRADUCTION ORYSIA PASZCZAK TRACZ, translator (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) TESTIMONY � FROMHOLOD 33 All the statistics, documents, and studies in the world are worthless without the first-person accounts, without the survivor and eyewitness testimonies of those living through an event. There can be no history without the stories of the individuals who were there. Ukrainians in the diaspora knew about, publicized, and commemorated the Genocide by Famine of 1932-1933. For the most part, they were not believed when they spoke out about the Famine, and were dismissed and defamed for bringing it up for discussion. Historians in Ukraine began collecting testimonies of survivors only during the period of glasnost', and after Independence in 1991. The accounts translated here are from the first major such collection, Holod 33: A National Memorial Book, edited by Lidia Borysivna Kovalenko and Volo- dymyr Antonovych Maniak.1 The publisher, Radians'kyi pys'mennyk ("Soviet Writer") no longer exists. It is now Ukrains'kyi pys'mennyk ("Ukrainian Writer"). The book was prepared and published before Ukrainian independence. The one thousand testimonies were collected in the seven oblasts [provinces] that comprised Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s. In Western Ukraine and in the dias- pora, testimonies were collected much earlier. There are common threads throughout the testimonies, no matter who the speaker is, and from where: collectivization, the good harvest the year before, the taking away of food, the government stores of food guarded from the popula- tion, the arrests, the hunger and bloating or shrivelling up, the deaths and burials, what was eaten in place of food, cannibalism, the children left at the railway sta- tions and in the cities, the numbers of dead in each village, the lists of families and names. Many mention the availability of food across the border, in Russia. Some speak about scarce incidents of kindness. Others remember those who went insane. The mind and heart of the reader cannot absorb these testimonies all at once. Each of the survivors tells his/her story simply, with no embellishment, and barely any emotion: " 1. Lidia Borysivna Kovalenko and Volodymyr Antonovych Maniak, eds., Holod 33: Ndrodna laayha-memorial [Holod 33: A National Memorial Book] (Kyiv: Radians'kyi pys'mennyk, 1991), p. 1. ... I am already 70, for me it is twilight. For those for whom it is only morning, I wish them a long life, but may the horror never repeat itself. If I see a piece of bread on the street, I must pick it up, and kiss it, because I do not know anything more precious than sacred bread.2 One hopes that now, almost a century later, their unspeakable pain and horror is acknowledged. The many testimonies must be republished in English and take their place in the mainstream of world history. ' Testimony l:, Stepan Kononovych Tymchenko. b. 1915. Invalid 2nd category. Resident of Horobiyi village, Zinkiv raion, Poltava oblast' How terribly people die from hunger. My father, Konon Denysovych, de- fended our Soviet government with weapons in arms. When they started register- ing people into the kolhosp [collective farm], he was the first to bring his horse and give his farm inventory, whatever he had. And then he had to die of hunger. In our family, eight died in 1933. My sister Maria died, her husband Fedir, and their five children. Three girls, 8, 7, and 5 years old, and two boys, one 3, and the youngest was still in the cradle, where he died. If there had been no bread. But there was bread, they just hid it from the people under enormous locks in the churches (from which the crosses had been dismantled), and in storehouses, guarded day and night. And it was taken away by railway cars. And those who had sown and threshed the grain, they were writhing in agonizing hunger. And no one defended the people, no one sympathized or took pity on them. In our village lived Onysiyka Kopytsia, a widow with three children. She was an invalid and could not walk. They issued the bread quota for her. Where will she get the bread? The authorities arrived, and carried her out of the house, into the rain. Tore the house apart, led away her cow. Snatched the cross off her neck. Where was the justice? There was silence for a long time about the famine in Ukraine, the one that mowed down so many people. Then the orphans grew up and went to defend their land from the Germans.... I think to myself, that if the famine had not happened, maybe the Germans would not have come here....33 2. Ibid., testimony of Anastasiya Ivanivna Duka, p. 491. : 3. Ibid., testimony of Stepan Kononovych Tymchenko, p. 482. .