Wounds that time cannot heal

The following story recounted by an 85-year-old woman reflects the history of an entire generation. Let us call her Vira (“Faith”). It is not her real name, but it reflects the essence of many people who lived through the Holodomor, World War II, and the repressions but still had faith in the justice of a system that promised them a “radiant future,” a dream that enabled them to tolerate their darkest days.

Vira was born in 1920 in a village in the Odesa region. She became a semi-orphan on the first day of her life, when her mother died in childbirth. The father raised his daughter on his own until he remarried, and Vira got an elder stepsister and later a stepbrother.

Vira clearly remembers the events of the 1930s to this very day. Collectivization was completed in the countryside by 1932. No wages were paid on the collective farm. Every villager had to complete 120 workdays in one working season. If someone failed to meet the target, s/he had to provide an explanation. At year’s end, after the harvest was gathered, the greater part of it was consigned to the state, and a certain percentage of the remainder was divided into the number of days worked and then distributed among the peasants in the form of grain, peas, etc.

In 1932, when it came time to distribute the earnings, it turned out that absolutely everything had been requisitioned. As people gradually found out, they began to contemplate using the previous year’s reserves for the next year. At this very time the government decreed that all “surplus” grain and other foodstuffs be consigned to the state because “the country’s working class was starving.”

The collective farmers refused to obey, in response to which the government launched the so-called “kulak dispossession campaign.” The first villager whom this fate befell was a neighbor of Vira’s. He and his family lived in a low-set thatched house resembling the one where Taras Shevchenko had been born and raised. There were a lot of children in the family, and all of them worked on their land. No hired workmen had ever set foot on their plot. Vira had never seen the mother of these children and thought they were orphans.

Those who carried out the kulak dispossession requisitioned everything down to the last grain. They did not harm the master of the house, although many so-called kulaks were arrested and sent “up the river.” This farmer was famous in the village because he had golden hands: he was especially good at making knee-high boots. After his dispossession, in order to be able to keep body and soul together, he began visiting other villages to mend footwear. He would bring home the food that he was given as payment: he would never eat it himself and was steadily becoming emaciated. One day, on his way home from work, he fell and died of starvation. He was the first casualty of the Holodomor in this village. All the villagers paid him their last respects. Nothing is known about the destiny of his children because nobody ever saw them again.

As the dispossession campaign was in full swing, searches were conducted every other day, if not every day. They usually came at night, pounding on the door and shouting, “Open up, it’s a search!” The people would open their doors and then stopped locking them altogether. Activists of the village “Committee of Poor Peasants” conducted these searches. Vira recalls that they would pry into every corner of the house and the backyard. They would take everything away, no matter how many children there were in the family, or what age they were.

Vira’s peers, as well as younger and older children, stayed out of school. Instead, they would go to the harvested fields early in the morning to look for something edible. It was a great joy to find a mouse hole with a handful of grain inside. Whoever found such a hole would be overjoyed, while the other children looked on with envy. A wonderful find was an ear of corn or a frozen carrot. The children would put this into their bag and carry it home.

This lasted until the heavy snowfalls arrived. When the ground was covered with snow, the famine intensified. People ate everything they could get their hands on. There was not a single fowl, pig, or cow left in the village — even dogs and cats began to be eaten. People were bloating up and starving to death. Word spread that a mother had eaten her own child in a neighboring village and that human corpses were also eaten.

Vira’s father looked for a job elsewhere. Since he was good at repairing sewing machines and other mechanical appliances, he would walk to neighboring villages. He would set out at dawn and come back late at night. More often than not people had nothing to give him, so he would return home empty-handed. Although his feet ached and became swollen, he left home every day in the hopes of finding something to feed his family.

Once he was given some millet. This was a real treat for the entire family. Chary of bringing the millet inside, he hid it in the yard. A search party came that same night. When they had finished, the father went ouside to get the millet, only to see that it had disappeared. Vira can still see her father going inside the house, tormented and swollen, sitting down on the floor, and weeping for a long time. The rest of the family cried with him.

People died every day. They would fall dead right on the street, in the fields and houses; they were no longer buried or mourned. Pits were dug and several corpses were thrown inside one of them.

Soon after, Vira’s 14-year-old sister went to Odesa to apply to a vocational school attached to the Lenin Cannery. She was admitted and assigned a place in the dormitory. Each student was given 400 grams of earthen-black bread a day. The sister did not eat even a tiny morsel of these 400 grams: she would dry the bread on a primitive metal stove and put it into a basket. When the basket was full, the girl told her school teachers that her family was starving, and they allowed her go home for two days in order to bring the dried bread.

Vira’s sister took the Odesa-Kharkiv train, clutching the basket containing the treasure for her famine-stricken family. But when the skinny 14-year-old girl reached her destination and stepped onto the railway station platform, a policeman came up to her, took her by the scruff of the neck, and dragged her to the police station. There, he spread out a mat, emptied out the whole basket, spanked the girl, and threw her out.

After walking 12 kilometers to her village, she came into the house and, unable to say a word, squatted down and wept long and hard over the empty basket. The basket was empty and so was the child’s soul. There is pain that cannot be described with words; there is profound despair that can only be compared to hell. Tears cannot take this pain away, time cannot dull it, and medicines cannot kill it — the memory of this is a lifelong open wound.

After crying her heart out, Vira’s sister, hungry and desolate, went back the same day.

During this period so-called torgsins (shops for foreigners), began to crop up. In these stores people could exchange their belongings for food. Vira’s father once visited a shop like this. His wife had left a beautiful wedding dress, a reminder of a dear person who was no longer alive. Ignoring the lump in his throat, father took the dress to the torgsin. In exchange, he was given a small loaf of bread blacker than earth.

At home, Vira’s father cut the bread into pieces for each child to eat. It seemed to Vira that she had never eaten anything tastier in her whole life. Yet she managed to swallow only one morsel: the next swallow sent her throat into a spasm. She began to choke and everyone rushed to help her. What an indescribable treat a tiny piece of earthen-black bread can be for a person robbed of the right to be a human and for whom the words “protection” and “care” can only be associated with her own father, not the state!

With the appearance of vegetation in the spring of 1933, people began eating grass, especially thick nettles. There had been no animals in the village for a long time. Peasants gradually began to sow vegetables, mainly beets, some potatoes, parsley, and dill. Little by little, bread began to appear, as did the hope of survival.

Vira recalls renting a room in a neighboring village, where she attended school. When she would leave her home after a weekend, she usually took some beets. Once in her room, she would divide them up for the entire week. It was a real feast when her father could give her some beans.

In 1935 Vira was admitted to a “working people’s faculty.” She was paid a scholarship that barely sufficed for corn flour. This flour had to be thinned in boiling water and then drunk. The girl used to take a glass of this “beverage” and go to classes. She had to content herself with the same drink for supper, so she always suffered from a hunger-induced headache. Sometimes Vira would just sit and cry. This only intensified the headache but perhaps dulled her spiritual pain. This lasted until October 1937, when Vira, a first-year student at a medical institute, received her first “excellent scholastic achievement grant.” For the first time in years she bought some halvah and bread and appeased her hunger.

She clearly remembers the time when she ran out of corn flour and money and had nothing to eat for three days. Then her stepmother’s sister suddenly came to visit Vira and gave her three rubles. It was evening, but Vira, forgetting even to say thank you, rushed to where some old women were selling corn flour. Although it was late, she managed to buy a few glassfuls of this flour. In her heart Vira still carries that unsaid “thank you.”

Vira can recount many more things: about the war that claimed the lives of all her relatives, the post-war devastation, etc. There are millions of destinies like this, not dozens, hundreds, or thousands. Those who lived through all these events are the bearers of history that has been etched on the heart, a history that is impossible not only to forget but which cannot be converted into a mere succession of historical facts, happenings, and dates.

These people are re-living it every day of their lives. They wake up and fall asleep, looking back on the past with a fear that this might reoccur some day. In the past this fear would compel them to put away for a rainy day most of their earnings. But those savings became the same emptied baskets as the one Vira told us about. Only God knows how much love and care it takes to ease their tormented hearts. Whoever considers himself human cannot help bowing to the memory of these people and do his best to alleviate their sufferings today and ensure that tomorrow will not create a hell on earth.