Hnidets, Klavdiia

Description

Creators

Klavdiia Hnidets (b. cir. 1927)

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Description

Letter sent from: Zarudtsi, Nesterov raion, Lviv oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Novomykolaivka, Melitopol raion, Dnipropetrovsk oblast
Current location name: Novomykolaivka, Melitopol raion, Zaporizhzhia oblast

Klavdiia Hnidets was 6 in 1933 and survived the Famine. Her sister was 9. She remembers how the search brigades took away all the grain that her father was given as payment for his work at the state farm. They also took the milk separator and beat up her mother. Her father was a middling peasant who was arrested for “unpaid taxes for 1 row of corn.” Her mother exchanged her scarf for some bread in Melitopol. She walked 5 km to a penal colony where she weeded potatoes. For that she was getting a ration and shared some bread with her children. Otherwise, the family survived on mock foods. Father swelled too much to move and died. Klavdiia and her sister’s legs swelled, too. Her cousins died after their father got deported to Solovki and their mother abandoned them. People were dying everywhere: on the road, in the yards, and in ditches.

She recalls how their cow was taken away along with other people’s cows. She says the kurkuls [kulaks] did not sabotage grain procurement and blames the Famine on Stalin and his henchmen. She supports memorialization of the victims of Famine.

Notes