Kravchenko, Semen

Description

Creators

Semen Kravchenko (b.1913)

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Description

Letter sent from: Ustymivka, Vasylkiv raion, Kyiv oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Ustymivka, Vasylkiv raion, Kyiv oblast
Current location name: Ustymivka, Bila Tserkva raion, Kyiv oblast

Semen Kravchenko was born in 1913. His mother died in 1929, while his father and 4 younger siblings died in the Famine.

His father had joined the collective farm in 1930 and surrendered all his implements and seeds. In 1932, a search brigade took away all their food. The family tried to survive on mock foods and weeds.

Kravchenko was working in a plant in Bila Tserkva, when he learned in June 1933 that his father had starved to death. He was 55 at the time and his body remained in the house for 3 days until Semen came back and helped bury him in a box in his own grave. Many others were dying in the roads and streets, and were being buried in mass graves.

Kravchenko stayed to take care of his siblings and eventually married, because living single and working at the collective farm was too hard. They survived on meager rations from the collective farm and mock foods. Still, he swelled up and was near death. He survived and later got malaria, which he also survived.

He recalls one mother ordering her two children to use her dead body as food, which they did. His two nieces, 10 and 6, went to the station, got on a cargo train to Fastiv. They were never seen again.

The 1933 harvest was actually good and they were paid in kind with grain per workday. Then he was recruited into the Red Army and served for 13 years, fighting in 3 wars: the Polish war, the Finnish war and the “Great Patriotic War [WWII].” Starting in 1948, he worked on a collective farm again until retiring in 1973. His pension was 44 rubles, rising to 50 in 1989.

He believes that the Famine was forced on Ukraine.

Notes