We found the front door of Solomia’s house open, but the entrance was blocked with snowdrifts, and it was hard to get inside. When we finally reached the living room, we saw a pitiful sight: Solomia was hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room. She was dressed in her Ukrainian national costume, and at her breast hung a large cross. It was obvious that she had made preparations before committing suicide. Her hair was combed neatly in two braids hanging over her shoulders.
Frightened, we ran to fetch Mother. We helped her take down Solomia’s frozen body, and laid it on a bench, and covered it with a handmade blanket. It was only after we finished doing this that we noticed the dead body of her little daughter. The child was lying in a wooden tub in the corner under the icons, clean and dressed in her best clothes. Her little hands were folded across her chest.
On the table was a note:
Dear Neighbors:
Please bury our bodies properly. I have to leave you, dear neighbors. I can bear this life no longer. There is no food in the house, and there is no sense in living without my little daughter who starved to death, or my husband. If you ever see Dmytro, tell him about us. He will understand our plight, and he will forgive me. Please tell him that I died peacefully, thinking about him and our dear daughter.
I love you, my dear neighbors, and I wish with all my heart that you somehow recover from this disaster. Forgive me for troubling you. Thank you for everything you have done for me.
After reading the note, we stood there for a while, motionless and forlorn. Our mother tried to suppress the sound of her weeping, pressing the corner of her head scarf to her lips. Mykola gazed at the corpses in disbelief.
In my imagination I was recreating the agony of their dying: the child’s hunger cries, and then the death convulsions of its exhausted little body.
How great must have been the sufferings of the mother. She had to listen helplessly to the pleas of her child for food, while she herself was near starvation. She must have felt great relief, I thought, when she saw her little daughter breathing for the last time. Then, in my imagination, I saw the mother attending to her lifeless child: dressing her in the best and cleanest clothing she had, praying on her knees near the body, and finally kissing her for the last time before her own suicide.
Mother interrupted my thoughts. We had to fulfill the last wishes of our dead neighbor and bury the two corpses properly. My mother always wanted to do everything correctly. But, how could we do it this time? We were too weak to dig a grave in the snow-covered frozen ground, or even to take the bodies to the cemetery.
After realizing these facts, we decided to leave them in the house. For the time being, the cold prevented their decay, so we just laid the body of the child beside her mother on the sleeping bench, covered them both with the blanket, and left.
After this sad discovery, we could not sit idly at home. There were many other houses around us that had no smoke coming out of their chimneys. We realized that similar tragedies had taken place there too. My mother was especially concerned about Boris’s family and also about a widow who lived with her crippled daughter in our neighborhood. She thought they might still be alive and in need of help.
Without losing much time, we went to Boris’s house. He also had not returned from the village jail, but had been transferred to the county center, and no one had seen him since. His wife, Khymka, was living alone with their two children. We frequently visited her, helping the family as much as we could. Lately, during the heavy snowstorms, we had lost all contact with them.
When we reached the front of Khymka’s house, we noticed a dark object protruding from underneath the snow. It was Khymka. Her body was completely frozen and covered with snow. We rushed into the house, anticipating the worst about her children: we were right. On the sleeping bench lay the corpse of Khymka’s eldest son, Trokhym. His hands were folded across his chest, his eyes were closed, and his frozen body was covered with an overcoat. At his head was a saucer with the remnants of a candle. Trokhym must have died before his mother. Then, in order to try and save the life of her other child, Khymka apparently left the house in search of help. But, too weakened by hunger, she collapsed a few steps in front of her house, and died in the snow.
We also found her youngest child, a boy of about eight years of age, in a bed. He was well-covered with several pieces of old clothing and miraculously still alive! He lay there totally exhausted by hunger and too weak to move. His body had stiffened and he was apparently half-frozen.
We had to act immediately to try to save the glimmer of life still in this young boy. There was no time for contemplation and emotions. We brought Khymka’s body back into the house and laid it alongside the body of her starved eldest son. It became clear to us that we had to take the youngest boy home with us, if we wanted to keep him alive, for his own house was freezing with not a trace of fuel for heating or food for survival. We carefully laid him on a sled and brought him home with us to revive him and care for him. Mother put him in bed, and told us that with God’s help, he might recover.
She then sent us with a sled to the widow’s house to bring her and her crippled daughter back with us if they were still alive. They lived close by, and it didn’t take us long to reach her house.
The widow Shevchenko and her crippled daughter Lida were also victims of government policy. A few years earlier, her husband had clashed with a Party representative when the collectivization scheme was being instituted. The representative had come to our village to organize the collective farm, and during a heated argument, Shevchenko had dared to call him “a stupid parrot!” That was his end. He was accused of assailing the dignity of the Communist Party, and he was sent to the north for five years of “corrective labor.” After a year or so, his wife received an anonymous letter telling her that her husband had died while digging the Baltic Sea-White Sea Canal. His widow now lived all alone with their daughter, who had been crippled from birth and needed constant attention. Widow Shevchenko had twice as difficult a task as the other villagers in providing food and other necessities for the two of them. Being tied down at home by the daily care of her handicapped daughter, she could not go to work. She could not get any official help either, since she was the wife of an arrested “enemy of the people.” She became a beggar, completely dependent upon the goodwill of her fellow villagers. When the whole village was struck by the famine, her fate was sealed.
We found her house on a hill not far from ours, completely snowbound, with the front door blocked by the snow.
We had a hard time clearing it away, and when we finally opened the door, we found the poor widow dead, just as we had feared, lying on the threshold halfway in the entrance hall. We carried her body into the living room and laid it on a bench. We found her daughter Lida, lying on a sleeping bench wrapped in many layers of rags but still alive. We carefully laid her on our sledge and rushed her back to our house.
At home, Mother was still occupied with Khymka’s young son. She was rubbing his body with snow, and there was also something cooking for him on the stove.
When we brought Lida indoors, Mother began ministering to her needs, and we took over the care of the young boy. After making them as warm and comfortable as we could, we tried to feed them porridge and some homemade herb tea prepared by Mother, but our efforts to force some food and warm drink into them were all in vain. Except for their slow and spasmodic breathing, they didn’t show any other signs of life, lying there completely motionless. When night fell, we witnessed their horrible death throes. At midnight, Lida died and the young boy followed shortly after.