On the seventh of August 1932, a law was passed concerning the theft of state property. This pertained to those collective farm workers who gathered up Men ears of wheat, or potatoes, on the collective fields after the reaping. There were instances when, (or a few gleanings, someone was sentenced to several years in prison or at
forced labor.

Already in the fall of 1932, famine raged. People began to mix flour with chaff and tree bark. They fed themselves mainly with vegetables. Swollen persons began to ap¬pear along the roads, wandering aimlessly. Railroad stations became crowded with people in search of food. Whole families died, and there were instances of can¬nibalism.

n the spring of 1933,1 left the village and found work in a newly organized state farm, Dvorichanskyi, and for a while I lived with a collective farm worker’s family in the neighboring village of Kamianka. One time, the daughter of this family came home late from work and told us how for two hours an agitator from the raion district assembled all the workers and lied to them about how wonderfully all the farm workers live now, and how agriculture is flourishing, and so on. When the girl asked, “Why don’t they give us bread for our workdays, and why don’t we have anything to eat?” he rebuked her, saying that he was hearing the voice of a subkulak, and that, after all, didn’t they feed them lunch at work?

Schools became empty; the children, feeble and sometimes swollen, couldn’t walk to school. In a few schools, they fed them soup, and this was the motivation for them to go to school

Our people’s innate creativity began to emerge, and a new type of ‘literature’ ap¬peared:

We have plenty of whiskey,
And dad’s bringing some more home,
But realty isn’t it a pity
That all the bread is already gone…

(Whiskey, cigarettes and tobacco were never lacking in the Soviet Union.) For such literature, several teachers were fired, and early that spring, the teacher Oransky, whom I knew personally, shot himself!

In the spring of 1933, the fertile Ukrainian soil was covered with human corpses. Corpses could be seen everywhere—on the roads, in the fields, at the railroad station. Sometimes I went to visit my village (for I still had family there), and I saw how spe¬cial brigades gathered the corpses from the streets and the houses and carted them to common graves, or simply threw them in ravines. Even these ‘undertakers’ themselves were half-dead.

It was frightening to look at people—I couldn’t even recognize some of my own friends.

In 1934,I left my region and went to work on a state farm in the Kharkiv area.

In that same year, I met a certain Havril Shevchenko at the Dvorichna railroad depot, who in 1931 was on the grain procurement brigade in our village and had taken everything from us. He was in rags, barefoot, filthy and frighteningly thin. Such were the rewards reaped by the majority of the activists of the period.