Liakhovetska, Ahafiia

Description

Creators

Ahafiia Liakhovetska (b. circa 1921), Author

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Image

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Transcriptions

Description

Letter sent from: Village of Lisove, Talne raion, Cherkasy oblast
Describes events in (in 1932-1933): Village of Lisove, Talne raion, Kyiv oblast
Current location name: Village of Lisove, Talne raion, Cherkasy oblast

The author describes working hard as a 12 year old in the collective farm to survive. Her parents sent her to work so that she could get fed "a spoon of makeshift soup" or get "a cup of beans" for a day of work. No one in her family of 5 died. Her brother and father worked in railway construction; her father also grew tobacco and her mother sold it at a local farmers’ market to pay the taxes.
Describes mock foods for survival, including dead horse meat that people were lining up for when horses died. It was dangerous to walk on roads alone at night because of cases of cannibalism by neighbors, by people in the family, or strangers that people let in at night. She witnessed cooked human meat and cut up remains of a boy killed by a neighbor.
Burial brigades threw people into a mass grave while they were still alive. One man in the village climbed out of the grave and survived. Recalls the 1946-47 famine and notes that there was no cannibalism at that time. People survived by trading things for food at "zapadna." It is not clear whether that is a location or a local name for some fair.

Notes