Letter sent from: Village of Trudovyk, Kozelshchyna raion, Poltava oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: unspecified location, likely the same as mailing address: Village of Trudovyk, Kozelshchyna raion, Kharkiv oblast
Current location name: Village of Trudovyk, Kozelshchyna raion, Poltava oblast
Yevheniia Pinchuk was around 13 at the time of the Famine. There were 9 people in her family. The harvest was not bad but everything was taken from them in multiple waves of requisitioning. Search brigades would confiscate everything, even shoemaking equipment.
During one of the raids, Pinchuk’s little brother tried to hide some pancakes from the search brigade, but one of the raiders found those pancakes and threw them in the garbage. The little boy was so shaken that he became sick and died two days later. Her father also died and was buried in a grave with another young man because the family of that man was too sick to dig a separate grave.
Pinchuk survived because she went to live with an older sister who had a cow, so she had milk and matorzhenyky, pancakes made of weeds and ground dried corncobs. She describes incidents of cannibalism, people attempting to steal their cow, and 17 people buried in a mass grave. She curses Stalin and laments that so many innocent people died during the famine or were executed in 1937.
Ukrainian transcription and English translation available.
