Letter sent from: Chervonoarmiisk (now Radyvyliv), Rivne oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Bar, Vinnytsia oblast
Current location name: Bar, Vinnytsia oblast
H. Melnyk sends Silski Visti a newspaper clipping from the Chervonoarmiisk raion newspaper Prapor Peremohy, dated March 21, 1989, with a story from a resident of Chervonoarmiisk, Stanislav Yanishevsky, who lived through the famine as a child.
Yanishevsky’s family lived in 1933 in Bar, Vinnytsia oblast. They had no food, except substitutes made of
corn cobs or dried sunflower stems. The older people like his grandmother died off first, sacrificing themselves for the children. Large numbers of people died on the streets. His grandfather collapsed by the fence and was picked up by the burial brigades while still alive. Yanishevsky went looking for him to the mass grave but could not find him, although many people were still alive, moaning in the open pit.
Members of the search brigades, city council officials and the police lived better and engaged in abuse and
the destruction of property during the searches. Yanishevsky’s father worked at a plant but made very little. He and his friends were looking for something to eat in a nearby villages that looked devastated. They
walked in on a cannibal in one house.
The meager rations at the local collective farm, pea soup, were meant only for those who worked on the
farm. The guards beat up anyone else who tried to approach the cauldron.
Yanishevsky’s mother stole a fistful of barley and was severely beaten up by the policeman who caught her.
Other people were savagely beaten for stealing grain from the new harvest.
An epidemic of typhoid hit the people in the summer. Aside from Torgsin, which was a trading post, there
were no functioning stores in the town. Yanishevsky dropped out of school because they had no school
supplies or clothing, and started working at the collective farm instead. Every time he visits the town where he grew up, he relives the trauma. The people who committed all the atrocities never repented and keep
covering their crimes up.
Ukrainian transcription available.
