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“НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ГРУДЕНЬ 2010 7 A C A N D L E I N R E M E M B R A N C E An Oral History of the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932 – 1933 Valentyna K. Borysenko was born in the Vynnytsia oblast of Ukraine in 1945. She graduated from the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv with a degree in history in 1968 and pursued postgraduat e studies at the M. Rylsky Institute of Fine Art, Folklore, and Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences, Ukrainian SSR. The author of some 170 scholarly works, Professor Valentyna K. Borysenko began collecting oral testimonies about the 1932 – 1933 Famine - Ge nocide in 1994. The end product of this intensive research was Свіча пам’яті , which was published in Ukraine in 2007. The excerpt cited here (abridged) is from Candle in Remembrance, the English translation of Dr. Borysenko’s work, recently published by t he UNWLA. Hryhorii Ivanovych Mazurenko remembers . Born in 1921, village of Semenivka, Makariv district . It was a terrible tragedy. I remember it well. My mother baked bread at the collective farm until the fall of 1932. Then one day they told her, “Don’t come back. The pantry has been cleaned out.” When the grain disappeared, the famine set in. I would go to the church up on the hill and tear the bark off the linden tree. At home we had buckwheat husks. Mother would sift them, add ground - up linden l eaves and bark, and bake biscuits. That’s how we ate. ... Ninety - six people starved to death here. Not far from here is another village, Liudvynivka; they ate their children there. They had horses there once, but they killed them and ate them. They ate human flesh, too. Here in Semenivka there was a woman whose children had died, so she cooked them and ate them. It was a very difficult time. There was a radhosp [state farm] in our village. ... They grew beets at the farm. They would gather us children and send us into the rows of beets to weed. They fed us some gruel. We worked until midday. Then the KGB would come. “You don’t want to hand over your grain? You don’t want to work at the collective farm?” And the minute you bought something, people infor med on you to the village soviet and they came and confiscated whatever it was you had in your sack. I knew those boys. None of them is around anymore. They were shot under the German occupation. ... My father and seven other men were the first to join the collective . . . . And after they joined, they worked for nothing. People lived in poverty. Before the famine, they took all the cows to the collective farm and they became communal property. ... There was a horse. The dead were picked up. There were diggers. They were given special rations for digging. They dug pits, the dead were brought over, and they unloaded them into the pits. People were buried in whatever they were wearing. ... Kyiv had a torgsin . I went there with Mother . . . she had gold rings. ... We got six or seven loaves of bread for the gold. We carried it all in a sack from Vasylkiv. How did we do it? There were no buses; we walked. Somehow we made it. In the village, there was nowhere to trade anything. ... My family survived th e famine. But my sisters were all swollen. And my feet swelled up, as big as boots. ... The famine was created on purpose, set into motion to exterminate people. Nineteen thirty - three was the most difficult year. In 1932, you could still survive more or less, there were still things to eat. But in 1933, there were heavy rains. The fields were flooded, the potatoes rotted, and there was nothing to plant. There were some wheat ears in the field. I picked some up and put them into my sack. I was afraid of b eing caught. They gave folks five years for picking wheat. Stealing state property! In our village two men were sent to prison for that. ... Stalin, Molotov, Yezhov, they’re the ones who did this to Ukraine. And how was Ukraine standing in their way? Th ey wanted to crush Ukraine because Ukraine wanted independence. There were a lot of our people in Siberia. Many went to Kyiv. To Russia. Entire settlements. Here it was the famine. It was hell. Recorded by V. K. Borysenko in 2005 .
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