A survivor recalls the Famine years (11/07/04)

A survivor recalls the Famine years

by Andrew Demus

I vividly remember 1931, our house, barn and stable. We had two horses, cows, pigs, sheep, geese and chickens. By 1933 we were left with just one cow. The barn was taken away for a collective farm, and so were the horses and pigs. How my father managed to hang onto our cow, I don't know, but when the calf was born, the milk saved our lives. My father was indispensable, as he was a carpenter, wheelwright rite, barrel maker and wagon builder. They needed him.

Farmers living outside the village were arrested and shipped out to Siberia. Hordes of Russian morons and some Ukraine Communists were roaming through the village with shotguns and steel probes - sharpened metal rods to probe for buried food. Every day someone was arrested. I could hear my mother and father talking about it in whispers.

Food became almost non-existent. The hunger made people go 10 kilometers to town where a pile of rotten potatoes was left outside the vodka-making building. All along the road there were people carrying the smelly, rotten potatoes. Some died along the road, probably from eating the stuff. A man, maybe in his 60s, was standing outside his home begging to an empty street. He looked like a ghostly skeleton. The next day I was told that he had died.

Father started to bring corn and wheat from the collective store.

At this time the Russian Communists began shooting all the dogs in the village. This was done because the dogs barked and alerted the farmers when the Russians came to rob them of their food. I had a wonderful friend and playmate named Bora, a beautiful German shepherd. We heard gunshots all day. When the wagon pulled up at our front gate full of dead dogs, I knew it was the end for Bora. When the barbarians came to kill Bora, I had my arm around his neck, crying, "No, no! Not Bora!"

When my mother came out to challenge them, they noticed a small cross hanging from a chain around her neck. They ripped it off and threatened to send her to Siberia. She took me by the arm, and then I heard a big bang. I knew my playmate was gone. That's when my hate for the Russian Communists was set in my heart.

In 1933 I was 7 and started school. In the school there was food for the kids, which was the reason we survived. The food at school was boiled corn flour - cup of the grey-looking, tasteless stuff, but it was food. Many adults, especially the elderly, did not make it.

The educated and the educators were arrested and sent to Siberia. Village teachers just disappeared ovenight and were replaced with Russian teachers. We were being taught about Pushkin, a Lermontov and always Stalin and all the Soviet apparatchiks.

There was a beautiful church on the hill. The morons cut the top off and made a warehouse out of it by 1935. I don't want to mention the name of the village since, according to my brother, there are still hard-line communists there even to this day.

Andrew Demus is a Ukrainian American who resides in Cornelia, Ga. He often lectures about his experiences under the Soviets and during World War II.

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