July 3, 1983

Media reports on famine. V

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Gwiazda Polarna

STEVENS POINT, Wis. – A letter to the editor of Gwiazda Polarna, a Polish-language newspaper published here, revealed the horror of the famine as seen by an eyewitness.

The letter, by Ludwika Czerska of Stevens Point, was published in the May 7 issue of the newspaper. It was written in response to Gwiazda Polarna’s front-page article on the Great Famine of 1932-33.

The full text of Ms. Czerska’s letter (in English translation) follows.

* * *

The article about the famine in Ukraine, which was published in Gwiazda Polarna on April 23 (“Ukraine: The Forgotten Crime”), awakened horrible memories. On the streets of Kiev I saw people who had come from the villages in the hope that in the city they would be able to save their lives. The village women left me with a horrifying impression: they hadn’t even the strength to hold their dying children in their arms. A cold wind blew, and they sat immobile on the sidewalks, staring straight ahead. Perhaps they did not understand what was happening to them. Next to them lay the dying, or already dead children. I stopped near one of these women. She softly whispered: “God, help us. God, help us.” She did not even have the strength to remain in a sitting position; she fell on the cobblestone street and fell silent. Shaken by this, I fled.

We were not allowed to show sympathy for “such people.”

In various locations throughout the city women sat with their children in tatters. They were afraid to speak out loud – they silently extended their hands, begging for some food. Everything was taken away from them: land, property, supplies. When I got up enough courage and asked an acquaintance whose husband was a party activist why these people must die of hunger, she looked at me as if I was stupid and indignantly replied: “Why, they themselves are to blame. They did not want to work on the collective farms. They wanted their own land. And so, this is what they got. They need a lesson like this.”

I met a six-year-old boy who was sitting alone and was unsuccessfully begging for food with an outstretched hand. I took him to my flat on the third floor. He clung to me, as if to his own mother. We stole home carefully so that, God forbid, no one would see us, because it was forbidden to help, to take any of the starving into one’s own apartment. The poor child was frighteningly skinny and sick. I wanted very much to take care of him, but the circumstances of our lives absolutely did not permit us to do this: I came home very late; my husband, after his return from prison, was ill; and my mother also could not help because of an illness so grave that she could not even get out of bed. I fed him, gave him some food for the road, dressed him in my own jacket, which reached down to his heels, and with a heavy heart and tears in my eyes, I led him back to where I found him – the streets. I never saw him again.

I saw corpses scattered on the streets of the cities. I saw dying children and mothers. I saw the famine that killed people like flies – and this in a country that was known for its fertile land and was once the breadbasket of Europe. This tragedy of the Ukrainian nation was premeditated and executed with precision.

Will the criminals be prosecuted? When?


London Telegraph

LONDON – The Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-33) was briefly alluded to in The Sunday Telegraph on April 17 by book critic Ronald Hingley in his review of actor Peter Ustinov’s “My Russia.”

After criticizing the apologist tone of the book and its glaring lack of scholarship, particularly in Mr. Ustinov’s reference to “4 million ethnic Russians” in inter-war Poland (Mr. Hingley writes that the figure “must apply to Ukrainians and Byelorussians”), Mr. Hingley chided Mr. Ustinov for downplaying the terrors of Stalinism.

“Most grievously of all, the author misleads by writing as if the worst horrors of the Soviet period had never occurred,” wrote Mr. Hingley. “Collectivization, the terror of the late 1930s, the Gulag Archipelago: it would have been better to say nothing at all about such things than to allude in passing to the sufferings which Stalin caused in ‘thousands’ of individual cases… One might debate whether millions or scores of millions would be the proper unit of measurement.”


Maine Telegram

GARDINER, Maine – The Maine Sunday Telegram on June 5 ran a letter from area resident Michael Semenec citing the Great Famine in Ukraine.

Noting that 7 million Ukrainians died during the famine, orchestrated by the Soviet regime to break the resistance of an independent-minded peasantry, and that 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, Mr. Semenec called on Americans and “all freedom-loving people of the world” to support democracy and remain willing to defend their freedom.

“The victims of Communism and Nazism call us to readiness,” he wrote. “No more Holocaust.”


The Ukrainian Weekly, July 3, 1983, No. 27, Vol. LI

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