The forms of hunger are terrible and varied. Hunger became the norm of life. In the entire country, only certain individuals had adequate amounts of nourishment. They were the highest officials and the cannibals. But both these categories constituted a negligible portion of society. Millions of the hungry were prepared to do anything just for a piece of bread.… Hunger divided people. Many of them lost the ability to feel compassion, the desire to help others.… In photographs from that period we see people passing indifferently next to a child lying in a gutter, we see women conversing calmly next to corpses strewn in the road, we see coachmen sitting comfortably on wagons from which protrude lifeless arms and legs.… Six-year-old Tania Pokidko picked a clove of garlic from the garden of a neighbor, Gavril Turko. He beat her so severely that after she had dragged herself home she died. Her father, Stiepan, was a Red guerrilla. He took four of his children, already swollen from hunger, and went to the county authorities to ask for help. When he was refused, he said to Polonski, the secretary of the county counciclass="underline" “It would be better if you ate them than for me to have to see how they suffer.” And he hanged himself on a tree in front of the council building. A peasant woman, Fiedorchuk, took pity on a neighbor’s children — six-year-old Nicholas and two-year-old Ola — and promised their parents that she would give them each a cup of milk a day. But the children did not receive the milk, because their father said to his wife: “All our neighbors’ children have died long ago, why should we feed ours? We have to save ourselves before it is too late.” A seven-year-old boy steals a fish in the market. The enraged crowd pursues him, catches him, stomps on him, and disperses only when the child’s body lies lifeless. The peasant Vasil Luchko lived with his wife, Oksana, an eleven-year-old daughter, and two sons — six and four years old. His wife, an energetic woman, would travel to Poltava to look for food. One day, a neighbor came by Vasil’s house and saw that the older boy was hanging in the door frame.
“What have you done, Vasil?”
“I hung the boy.”
“And where is the other one?”
“In the closet. I hung him yesterday.”
“Why did you do it?”
“There is nothing to eat. When Oksana brings back bread, she gives everything to the children. And now, when she arrives, she will also give me something to eat.”
Tragedies occurred when those who traveled to other regions to obtain food found no one left alive upon their return. Death ruled the countryside. Mass graves with room for several dozen corpses at a time were dug in advance — no one doubted that they would be filled within several days and that new ones would have to be dug … wagons transporting bodies to these graves became a common sight throughout the countryside … representatives of the regime walked from house to house asking if anyone had died, and if someone had, they helped drive the body to a communal pit.… What did people eat? Acorns were deemed a delicacy. Besides that, bran, chaff, beet leaves, tree leaves, shavings, sawdust, cats, dogs, crows, earthworms, frogs. In the spring, when grass appeared, dysentery and diarrhea mowed down more than even hunger did. In the mid-thirties, the situation in the countryside became so ghastly, that whoever happened to be thrown into prison considered himself one of fate’s chosen — at least he would get a piece of bread there. (Sergei Maksudov, Zvenia, Moscow, 1991)
To crush the peasant opposition, the authorities closed village shops, schools, and medical clinics. Peasants were not allowed to leave their villages, were prevented from entering the towns. Signs were placed along the roads near the entrances to villages considered mutinous: STOPPING HERE IS FORBIDDEN, SPEAKING WITH ANYONE IS FORBIDDEN! In villages lying along railroad lines, peasants would rush toward the tracks whenever a train was approaching. They would fall to their knees, raise their arms in supplication, cry out: “Bread! Bread!” The train crews were instructed to shut the windows, draw the curtains.
Entire families died — later, entire villages.
Seeing that death was nearing, the village started to howl. In the entire village peasants were howling — it was not the voice of reason or of the soul; it was like the noise leaves make in the wind, or the rustle of straw. I would get angry then: Why are they howling so plaintively? They are no longer human, and yet they cry so. I went out into the fields sometimes and listened: they are howling. I walked farther: it seems to have stopped. But I take several more steps and hear it again — it is the neighboring village howling. And it seems that the whole earth is howling together with the people. There is no God, so who will hear it? (Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows, Warsaw, 1990)
MRS. KAMIELOWSKA says that the worst of it began in the summer of 1932. A law was then passed that the peasants called the Law of the Blade of Grain. Stalin invented it and wrote it himself. It had to do with the protection of kolkhoz property. According to it, one could be sentenced to several years in the camps, or even shot, if one stole as much as a blade of grain or a carrot or a beet. Similar punishment awaited the tractor driver whose tractor broke down, or the kolkhoz member who lost a hoe or a shovel.
The law was promulgated in the beginning of August, when the grain was still high in the fields. In many places where wheat or rye grew, watchtowers were built. NKVD men were posted on them, with rifles ready to shoot — they were to drive away anyone who would dare pick so much as a single blade. The edges of the fields and the roads were likewise patrolled by mounted NKVD men, also guarding the harvest. Even the Pioneers were sent in to help, but were later pulled out, for these were children, and children died in the greatest numbers — not only from hunger, but also because cannibals carried them off.
So people saw the wheat, saw the swaying blades. Whoever had any strength left walked out of his cottage to look at the growing crops. But the peasants had to stand at a long distance from the fields. They knew that if they came closer, a shot would ring out. And the summers happened to be hot then, sunny. From the cottage window one could see, far away, black spots on the horizon — these were human skeletons, dressed in rags, consumed by fever and typhus. Some of them did not return to the village, but stayed there, looking, forever.
It sometimes happened, Mrs. Kamielowska reminisces, that a horse would drop dead right under one of the NKVD men, for their animals were also skinny and weak. One would see above a stand of grain the silhouette of an NKVD man on horseback. He would sit, look around, and then suddenly vanish. The horse had simply collapsed under him. A rare moment of hope would ensue, because there would be confusion among the NKVD and one could take advantage of these few seconds to get to the grain and pick a few blades. This was something at least, enough only for a day, perhaps for two, but, nevertheless, something.
Death came from hunger, but it also came from eating. A brigade of agitators would sometimes arrive from town and bring bread. People threw themselves upon it, ate, ate, and then started to cry, to contort from pain. Some died instantly.
The worst thing was the house searches. The government people would pull up the floorboards, rake up every square inch of the garden, dig in the field. They were making sure there wasn’t any food hidden anywhere. If they did find any, they would take it all away and throw the owner into prison. They took Mrs. Kamielowska’s husband — whom she calls Józik — six times. She would go to the district’s administrative office, kneel, cry. She was a fortunate woman, for somehow they would always let him go. And the reason she was fortunate, she maintains, is that she believed in God. God will never abandon man, she tells me with conviction. She herself is the best proof of this. Because later they deported her to Kazakhstan and took her husband to the war. In Kazakhstan things were as difficult as in the Ukraine, and on top of that the climate was worse. She walked eight kilometers through ice and wind to the kolkhoz to labor. She was certain that her husband had been killed in Germany. And then, look! Here he is, back from the war! It was from that reunion that Father Ludvik was born, who is sitting here with us and smiling.