Early Survivor Testimony on the Holodomor

By Bohdan Klid

Considering the scope and magnitude of the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, the unfathomable tragedy of human suffering associated with it, and the fact that it was caused by the criminal actions and policies of the Soviet government, information published in English about the Holodomor in North America and Western Europe was relatively sparse until the late 1980s. This dearth can be explained in part by the Soviet government’s cover up and disinformation campaign, complicity in the cover up by some Western journalists and writers, and decisions of Western governments not to publicize the considerable information they had gathered on the famine.

The lack of documents and writings on the famine, acted in a sense to stimulate and give great weight to the publication of survivor testimonies, important evidence in making the wider public, government officials, and scholars aware of the fact that this Kremlin-engineered apocalypse had indeed taken place. The Ukrainian community outside of Ukraine - especially in North America - spearheaded efforts to collect and publish these testimonies.

Survivor testimonies tend to be more accurate and detailed, and thus valuable, if they are given by adults soon after the event they lived through has taken place. One of the earliest testimonies  published in North America (in the form of an interview) was given in early September 1933 to the co-workers of the newspaper Ukrains’kyi holos [Ukrainian Voice] by Marie Zuk [Maria Zhuk] from southern Ukraine, who was passing through Winnipeg with her two small children to join her husband Walter, who lived near Consort, Alberta.

Maria Zhuk’s testimony is valuable for a number of reasons. It pointed to the artificial nature of the famine and its causes (actions by Soviet officials, who took away all grain at the direction of the Kremlin); it portrayed the cynical and criminal character of secret police officials, who knew their actions would lead to the peasants starving; it confirmed that certain areas of the Soviet Union, like Moscow, had plenty of food; and it allows one to ask the question: What kind of a regime would allow its citizens to descend to such a state of desperation in which cannibalism would become commonplace?

Maria Zhuk’s testimony was so compelling, that it was used by the leadership of the Ukrainian National Council in Canada (a predecessor of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress) as the basis for composing Bulletin No. 1, which was issued to inform Canadians and others about the famine. The leaders of the Ukrainian National Council in Canada appended the Bulletin to letters appealing for aid for the famine victims, which were addressed to Canadian Prime Minister R.B. Bennett and British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. Information from the Bulletin, largely Maria Zhuk’s testimony, also served as the basis for a short article on the famine, “Starving Parents Eat Own Children” published October 10, 1933, in the Edmonton Journal.

The testimony of Maria Zhuk (an excerpt of which follows, below) is to be reprinted in the survivor testimony section of a planned book, co-edited with Alexander Motyl, tentatively titled The Holodomor Reader, to be published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Orest Martynovych provided the bibliographic reference to the Maria Zhuk interview; Alexander Motyl translated it from Ukrainian into English.

* * *

“Zhinka z Ukrainy opovidaie pro holod i liudoyidstvo [A Woman from Ukraine Tells about Famine and Cannibalism],” Ukrains’kyi Holos, Winnipeg, September 13, 1933. Excerpts, pp. 1, 5.

The wife of Ivan [Walter] Zhuk [Zuk], a farmer in Consort, Alberta, came to him from the First of May district near Odessa, Ukraine. On the way, she made a stop in Winnipeg for a few days, and was brought to the editorial offices of The Ukrainian Voice …

Q: How were people living in Ukraine?

A: There was a terrible famine. People were dying of hunger like flies.

Q: Are people suffering the famine quietly or are they rebelling?

A: How are they to rebel and what will they achieve by rebelling? They suffer, because they’ve lost all hope. They walk like the blind, and they fall wherever death strikes them. No one pays attention to the corpses lying on the streets. People either step over or sidestep them and keep on walking. From time to time they’re collected and buried in common pits. Seventy and more people are buried together.

Q: Have you heard anything about instances of cannibalism?

A: Why not? It happens all the time. There have been cases of a mother starving with her children and then killing and eating them when she sees they’re about to die…

Q: What’s the reason for the famine?

A: There’s been a harvest, we sow and we plant, but as soon as anything grows, they take it away and pack it off to Moscow. We had a good harvest this summer, but so what? They sent in the machines, cut everything, ground it up, and didn’t leave us a single kernel. They took everything. People were weeping. They asked, “What will we eat?” But the chekists [members of the secret police] laughed and answered: “You’ll find something.” What people won’t do in order to hide some grain for themselves. They hide it in their hair, they hide it in their mouth, beneath their tongue, but they [the chekists] search it out and take it too.

Q: Do the people in the collective farms live better?

A: At first they had it better, but now they take everything from them as well. I myself was in a collective farm, and if I haven’t died thus far and could leave, it’s only because my husband in Canada sent me money and I could buy things in the Torgsin shops [state-run hard currency stores]…

Q: Don’t people expect something better in the future?

A: They used to, but now things get worse and worse with every year. And now they’ve reached the limit. No one expects anything anymore; everyone just expects death. Even the officials don’t know what the future holds and only shrug their shoulders. Some tell the people, “Rebel, and we’ll join you.” And the people respond: “You rebel first.”

Q: They take your wheat and grain, and you have no bread, but may you keep your animals? Cows, horses, chickens, pigs?

A: The famished people ate everything. If anyone still has a horse or cow, they guard it like the greatest treasure. People caught field mice and ate them like the greatest delicacies. The cats and dogs have been eaten long ago. Some collective farms still have pigs, but the chekists guard them and seize and take them away as soon as they grow fat. People have already forgotten how pork tastes.