Thad: 0:00

A while back, we sat down to record an episode dealing with the Ukrainian hunger famine, or Helodomor. As we dug into the sources, we realized that to even try to understand the circumstances and people involved, we would need to go back a bit in order to set the stage for this tragedy. And we're currently in the middle of that work. However, as this is the fourth Saturday of November, we wanted to honor Holodomor Remembrance Day with a story of a boy who lived it. This is an excerpt from the book Execution by Hunger, The Hidden Holocaust, by Simon Starow, writing under the pseudonym Miron Dolot.

Robyn: 0:42

One morning, in late January 1933, while it was still dark, Mother and I set out along the main street through the center of the village for the county town. We followed the street to the main road which led straight into the town. It was a memorable trip. Soon the sun rose and started to shine in all its brilliance in the vast blue sky with the white snow cover reflecting its light. The landscape was very calm and silent. We met nothing that was alive. There were no birds, cats, or dogs, not even their traces in the snow signaling life. And we didn't meet a single human being. I had the eerie sensation that we were indeed walking in the kingdom of death. The only sign that people were still alive was the smoke rising from distant chimneys. However, not many houses showed this signal. The majority of them, buried in deep snow drifts, hid the horrible sight of their inhabitants, suffering and dying from starvation. Soon, however, as we slowly made our way through the snow towards the village center, graphic evidence of starvation became visible. We noticed a black object which, from far away, looked like a snow covered tree stump. As we came near, however, we saw that it was the body of a dead man. Frozen limbs protruding from under the snow gave the body the appearance of some grotesque creature. I bent down and cleared the snow off his face. It was Ulas, our elderly neighbor, whom we had last seen about a month ago. A few steps further we saw another frozen body. It was the corpse of a woman. As I brushed away the snow, horror made my blood turn cold. Under her ragged coat, clutched tightly to her bosom with stiff hands, was the frozen little body of her baby. We finally left our village behind and stepped into the open road which led to the county seat. However, another ghostly panorama now opened in front of us. Everywhere we looked, dead and frozen bodies lay by the sides of the road. To our right were bodies of those villagers who apparently had tried to reach the town in search of work and food. Weakened by starvation, they were unable to make it and ended up lying or falling down by the roadside, never to rise again. The gentle snow mercifully covered their bodies with its white blanket. One could easily imagine the fate of those people whose bodies were lying to our left. They most probably were returning from the county town without having accomplished anything. They had tramped many kilometers in vain, only to be refused a job and a chance to stay alive. They were returning home empty handed. Death caught up with them as they trudged homeward, resigned to dying in their village. The wide open fields stretching for kilometers on both sides of the main road looked like a battlefield after a great war. Littering the fields were the bodies of starving farmers who had been combing the potato fields over and over again in the hope of at least finding a fragment of a potato that might have been overlooked or left over from the last harvest. They died where they collapsed in their endless search for food. Some of those frozen corpses must have been laying there for months. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to cart them away and bury them. The actual seven miles distance to the town proved to be very laborious for us. After we left our village, a cold wind started blowing from the north and the clouds appeared on the horizon. It was difficult, especially for mother, to walk against the wind, but we stubbornly persisted, and after about six hours of struggle with the wind and snow covered road, we arrived at the entrance to the county town. Here, yet another horror awaited us. Our county seat at that time had no sewage system, and the raw sewage was collected, usually at night, by a special sanitary brigade. There was no special dumping ground for the cargo of the horse-drawn sewage tanks. They were usually emptied outside the town, along the sides of the roads. The road from our village to the county seat seemed to have been their favorite dumping ground. Consequently, both sides of the road, for a considerable stretch, were thickly covered with raw sewage. This was in itself a most distasteful sight and unpleasant in normal times, but we had become used to it. Now, as we slowly trudged along these littered roadsides, our stomachs turned over anew. Scattered here and there throughout the sewage were frozen corpses. They were lying singly or in groups, or just piled up on top of another, like debris after a disaster. Some were covered with snow, showing only arms and legs protruding. Others were covered by freshly dumped raw sewage. The infants were invariably pressed to their mothers' bosoms under the cover of homemade coats. These dead were farmers from the neighboring villages and their families all victim of starvation. Deprived by all means of existence, the farmers saw their only chance of survival in escaping to the city where they hoped to find some job, some food, and some help. Despite the prohibitions on leaving the boundaries of their villages, they moved in throngs to the county seat, swelling and annoying its population and city management. They appeared on the doorsteps of houses, begging for a crumb of bread, or even a piece of potato peel, usually in vain. The city inhabitants, with their own meager food rations, could not give the villagers sufficient food to save them from starvation. There were simply too many of them. They were standing or lying in the city streets and marketplaces, at the railroad stations, under fences, in backyards, in the ditches by the streets and roads, and they became such everyday sights that the city people mostly passed by them, ignoring them and their pleas. Thus, after fruitlessly trying everything and going everywhere, the villagers and their families met their inevitable deaths. The dead lay undiscovered or ignored for days, like driftwood. Often the starving people would be rounded up like cattle by militiamen, taken to the city limits, and left to their fate. The dead, and those barely alive and unable to walk anymore, were all loaded onto trucks or horse-driven carts and hauled away somewhere outside the city limits. They were dumped into ravines or in dumping grounds for sewage along the roadsides. Weren't these people entitled to at least a decent burial in the cemetery? Even common graves? When mother and I finally arrived in Torgson, there was already a great crowd of starving people there. Emmaciated and skeleton-like, or with swollen, puffed up bellies, human beings stood around in the streets, leaned against the telephone poles and walls, or lay on the sidewalks and in the street gutters. They were patiently waiting for some merciful shoppers to share a pittance of their purchases with them. Others were begging noisily, shouting and crying. The rest held out their hands quietly and silently. Here and there, among the crowds, we could see rigid bodies of the dead, but nobody paid any attention to them.