Letter sent from: Fastiv raion, Kyiv oblast
Letter describes events in (1932-1933) in: Village of Katerynivka, Zinov'evsk raion, Odesa oblast
Current location name: Village of Katerynivka, Kropyvnytsky raion, Kirovohrad oblast
Mykola Chervonoshtan was eight in 1933. There were nine people in his family. He mostly recalls events as he heard them from his father and his mother. There is also certain dramatization present in the description and analysis of events.
His father had 11 desiatyna (approximately 12 hectares) of land, mostly allotted to him after the Revolution. The 1932 harvest was good. They gathered 600 pood or nearly 10,000 kg and 12 centners of grain. It was all taken away by the kolhosp. There was clearly no reason for people to be dying of starvation.
Chervonoshtan focuses mostly on the perpetrators, such as his father's koum (godparent relation) Smychenko who was the head of a kolhosp and sent search brigades to their home four times. They never found anything, and his father was called to the village council for a talk about delivering more grain. Later, when the father got a job at a mine in Kirovohrad, Smychenko ended up working in the same mine and stealing wood. After the war, he became a gang leader, stealing and slaughtering cows for meat and ended up being sentenced to 15 years in prison, where he was killed.
The author mentions that his mother told him about cases of cannibalism, mostly involving people finding
fingers in cutlets bought at the market.
Ukrainian transcription available.
