In 1934 I was taken to work at a concentration camp in Byelorussia. The people in this camp were engaged in building the Stalin line. This line was a line of defense against the Germans stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. All of the workers in the camp where I had been taken were from either the Ukraine or the Kuban area.

Most of the workers were very young, between 18 and 29 years of age, the precise time when young people marry and start a family. Most of the people who had been taken, myself included, were not even given terms of sentence. I was told that I would remain at the labor camp for as long as it took me to, quote/unquote, ‘gain the trust of the Soviet government’.

I was given periodic injections, probably tranquilizers, which interfered with my ability to think. The authorities at the camp wanted the people to work without being able to think about what they were doing, or about their fate. In 1937,I was permitted to leave the labor camp only because I had injured my back and was unable to work.

It was following my release from the concentration camp that I was able to return to my native village, where I learned of my father’s and my brother’s execution by firing squad. Only my younger sister remained. I had no idea what happened to my elder sister. I subsequently discovered that in 1940 she had been exiled to Siberia.

Neighbors and acquaintances who survived the famine told me not only of my fami¬ly’s fate but also about the horrors wrought by the famine during 1933. Not only had many people starved to death, but so had the domestic animals which were necessary for the survival of people.

Most of the horses had starved to death. Those horses that were still alive but very weak were tied around the middle and suspended in air during the night, in order to prevent them from falling down and expiring from exhaustion.

All through the winter of 1933, the horses were fed the hay taken from cattle sheds. The horses that managed to survive till spring revived by eating the newly sprouted grass. It was the Russians, in the main, who conducted the grain seizures of 1932 that precipitated the famine. Our people from the komnezam (Committee of Non-Wealthy Peasants) aided and abetted them. During the famine there were 350,000 Soviet troops stationed along the borders between the Ukraine and Russia.

Russian tanks and planes stood ready to put down what the Russians feared would be a revolt precipitated by the grain seizures.

Panas Liubchenko, a secretary of the Central Committee in the Ukraine from 1927 to 1933 and Prime Minister of the Ukrainian Soviet Government in the late 1930s, having seen the sword of Damocles suspended over the Ukraine, commented to his close friends that the famine was created not because of collectivization, but because when the Ukraine had lost its struggle for independence, Stalin said, quote, “Any way you look at it, the Ukrainians are already in the bag. All that remains for us to do is to tie the bag.”

Stalin began systematically to destroy the Ukrainian intelligentsia in 1929. A year later in 1930, he created the S.V.U., a show trial of leading personalities in the All-Uk¬rainian Academy of Sciences and in the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

1 There is no evidence that Stalin had actually said this. (Staff Insert).