LK: Nobody wanted [collectivization], because historically Ukrainian farmers were individualist. And so people couldn’t fathom any collectivization. Obviously people resisted. Our people liked to drink a little bit, and my uncle Mykhailo (he changed his last name from Korownyk to Dobrovolsky because he was being persecuted), who was the head of the village council, and before that was in the Red Partisans [during the Civil War], got together with some men, they had a few drinks, and said to them,  “Listen, is this the regime for which we fought?” Someone informed on him, and [the authorities] told my uncle, “You’re getting three years in Siberia. If you hadn’t been in the Red Partisans, you’d get a bullet in the forehead.”

They set up a blockade of guards around every city. In some places in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, from what I heard, they even put up wooden guard towers, and a soldier would stand on it and make sure that nobody would come into the field to collect grain stalks after the harvest. [If someone did] they were shot. It made no difference if it was a man, woman, or child – they were shot. My uncle lost his strength, and died. Peasants weren’t allowed into the cities, because they tried to go there to trade anything they had [for food]. My father told me that he had nice clothes, as a young man, and he traded it all for some food. There was almost a border around the city; they didn’t let peasants into the city or let anyone from the city to the village. People tried to go this way or that, and as I write in my poem, they died. First they walked, then crawled, then swelled, and fell and died. My father told me that, at night, when you went outside, and there was still a dog left somewhere, the dog could feel the death, that there were dead people lying everywhere. The dog howled so loudly that peoples’ hair would stand on end. Even the dogs felt that there was something abnormal going on.

I wrote a poem, “The Little Sinner.” I was about two and a half years old, and my mother’s uncle lived very close, two doors down from us, in the village. I walked there and got very tired, even though it was very close, because I was hungry. I stopped by a birch tree and rested a bit. I see this as if it was today – they had a shed beside the house, and in the corner they had a small pile of potatoes. This was our family. I took one of the potatoes and brought it home. My parents saw this, and although there was a famine, they said, “Son, it’s not right to do that. You take that potato back to your aunt and uncle and apologize to them. And that’s what I did.”

[Reads an excerpt of his poem “The Little Sinner”]

Taking a potato from my uncle

A little sinner I became.

But my parents said to me

It isn’t right to do what you did.

With my thoughts alight with shame

I went to my kin to beg forgiveness.

Leonid Korownyk

Date of birth: 30 October 1930

Place of birth: Pochyno-Sofiivka village, Dnipropetrovsk oblast

Witnessed Famine in: Pochyno-Sofiivka village, Dnipropetrovsk oblast

Arrived in Canada: 1948

Current residence: Edmonton

Date and place of interview: 20 March 2009, Edmonton

Excerpt From Full Interview