Letter sent from: Village of Khvoshchivka, Khorol raion, Poltava oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Villages of Khvoshchivka, Petrakiivka and Olimpiadivka, Khorol raion, Kharkiv oblast
Current location name: Villages of Khvoshchivka, Petrakiivka and Olimpiadivka, Khorol raion, now Poltava oblast
Danylo Hlushchenko is a retired teacher, and A. Komar was head of the kolhosp in the village of Khvoshchivka in 1933. They collected testimonies from hundreds of older people in the villages of Khvoshchivka, Petrakiivka and Olimpiadivka in Khorol Raion, Poltava Oblast, then Kharkiv Oblast in 1933, in the summer of 1988.
They supply a section from a local newspaper, Khorolska Pravda, dedicated to the 1933 Famine. They composed lists of people who died in each family and in each locale in 1933: 111 people died in
Khvoshchivka, 26 in Petrakiivka, and 2 in Olimpiadivka. Altogether 139 people died in the villages belonging to Khvoshchivka village council. The director of the Khvoshchivka peat bog Arok Aazarevich Zaturensky, who subsequently became a victim of Stalinist terror, helped many people survive the famine by giving them work and food twice a day.
The famine was the result of several excessive grain requisitioning campaigns and the total, extreme
requisitioning of homes by search brigades at a time when people were receiving nothing in return for their work at the kolhosp and had nothing left to gather from their gardens.
Ukrainian transcription and English translation available.
