KS: The women revolted, and wouldn’t go to work in the collective farm. They were beaten and chased off to work. Men didn’t do this. It was mostly women, because they thought that women wouldn’t be [treated as harshly]. But men had to answer for their wives. That was the women’s revolt against the organization of collective farms.

Usually they would dekulakize [dispossess] people at night, when people were asleep. Once my friend Motya came to our house, crying. I asked her why she was crying. She said that they had come to dekulakize her family and took her father away. Her mother ran away, and in the morning the children were left alone in the house. But she had to go to school. I don’t know where the smaller children were. So she came to our house, crying. She said, “I don’t know where my parents are, and I don’t know what to do.” I said, “Motya, come to our house. We have a big family and they’re not going to dekulakize us. You can come live with us.” She said, “No, no, I’m going to go look for my mother.” And after she left, I didn’t see her again. They took the mother and the children away.

My brother went to the collective farm in the spring of 1933, when they had collected the potatoes for planting. He was about ten or eleven years old, and he saw that pile of potatoes in the barn, and he dug out a hole under the wall and took five or ten potatoes. The guard saw and caught him. They took the potatoes away from him and took him for the night to the police. We were looking for him all night; my mother didn’t sleep all night.

I went to collect grain stalks. We lived near the fields, so when everyone left the fields I would take a bag or put on an apron and go collect stalks. There was a guard who rode around the field to make sure nobody stole anything, and when I saw him riding towards me, I had to throw away the grain stalks I had collected and run away to my house.

I saw how they took the priest from the church. He was serving a funeral, and they took him away. People were dying en masse. When the Famine started, they hadn’t closed the church yet, and the bells rang when someone died. I remember one day, we counted that seven people had died. When more and more people started dying in the spring they took the bells down. Many people died. Nobody buried them, nobody sang “Eternal Memory,” bells didn’t ring, nobody made coffins. Nobody took them to the cemetery. They were buried where they had died.

Kateryna Shcherban (Levkovets)

Date of birth: 24 October 1918

Place of birth: Svarovye village, Kyiv oblast

Witnessed Famine in: Svarovye village, Kyiv oblast

Arrived in Canada: 1951

Current residence: Toronto, Ontario

Date and place of interview:  23 July 2008, Toronto

Excerpt From Full Interview