YW: The hops grew nearby our house. There was a plantation, surrounded by wire. When hops begin to grow in the spring, they’re pink, and look similar to asparagus. My mother cut the hops, made pancakes, and fried them. That’s how she fed us. She also gave us pigweed, which is similar to spinach. Our family had some gold heirlooms, which she took to the TORSYN (stores for foreigners). You could get a bit there. My father worked at the village council as an accountant, and from time to time, he could get something there. So somehow they pulled through. I’m really quite amazed by it. I remember my mother saying that she hid us so that nobody would kidnap and eat us. She was scared [this would happen]. [She would tell us] “Close the door and stay in the house. Don’t go anywhere.”

My father was an orphan from the age of eleven. [The authorities] constantly harassed him. I remember that from time to time they would call him to the NKVD. He would have to go to Chernyakhov, the county town. He never knew if he would come home, so we always said our farewells. He was harassed, first, because he was the son of a kulak, and second, because he married what they referred to as a Pole. My mother was from Galicia [Western Ukraine, occupied until 1939 by Poland], from the mountains. In 1914 she was separated from her parents, and lived in my father’s house, and they eventually got married. So [the authorities] knew she was from Western Ukraine, and constantly wanted to know if we had any correspondence, and so forth. That’s what life was like. My father was terrified of them. They searched for him in Germany [after WWII], because they didn’t like to let victims go.

In the village council, statistics were taken very seriously. Everything had to be documented with statistics. So when people died they had to be accounted for, and a cause of death given. There was an order from the oblast that starvation was not to be given as a cause of death for those who died from starvation. The head of the village council came up with the idea to list exhaustion or dysentery as the cause of death. It would be very easy to tell from these documents who died [of starvation]. Why did supposedly healthy people die from exhaustion? That’s how the statistics were kept. This was the responsibility of the head of the village council. My father was only the bookkeeper, and there was also a secretary, but because there were too few of them, my father also helped. And he saw [how they kept the statistics]. But they simply didn’t care. Who could he tell? They didn’t think that he would leave [the USSR] and write about it here.

[READS FROM HER FATHER’S MEMOIRS]

Two brothers, Mishunsky, Harasym, who later became the head of the collective farm, and Makar, lived in seperate houses not far from the village council. Makar had an eight-year-old son with blond hair. He often came to the village council. One day this boy disappeared. The head of the village council searched for him, not knowing what to do. He asked everyone if they had seen the boy the day before. A woman told him that she had seen the boy on the street where the Kalenyk family lived. Kalenyk had died, his wife was swollen, near death, and their daughter Olena, who was 18-20 years old. She had joined the Komsomol. Bukharsky [the head of the village council] went into their house, searched it, and found boiled flesh in a pot in the oven. Beside the potato cellar, he saw a freshly covered hole. Bukharsky took a shovel and dug up a boys’ head. Bukharsky took the head and flesh with him, and brought the girl to the village council. I saw the head of that boy and saw the girl. The head of the village council phoned the GPU. In the evening a police agent came, took the girl and ordered that the boy be buried. Olena never returned to the village again.

Yulia Woychyshyn (Stepanenko)

Date of birth: March 1929

Place of birth: Zorokiv village, Zhytomyr oblast

Witnessed Famine in: Zorokiv village, Zhytomyr oblast

Arrived in Canada:

Current residence: Ottawa

Date and place of interview:  21 October 2008

Excerpt From Full Interview