Lutska, О.H.

Description

Creators

O.H. Lutska (b. 1909), Author

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Description

Letter sent from: Skvyra, Kyiv oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Velykepolovetske, Skvyra raion, Kyiv oblast
Current location name: Velykopolovetske, Bila Tserkva Raion, Kyiv oblast and Skvyra, Kyiv oblast

Lutska worked as an agriculturist at the Velykolopovetske MTS or machine tractor station in Skvyra Raion at the time. She did not go hungry because she was given a ration that included 18 kg of flour per month.

Lutska worked with 5 collective farms. All grain, both food and seed, was taken away from 3 of the collective farms. Starvation pushed some people to cannibalism. A male friend offered to walk a young woman to work and she disappeared. Later, when he was dying of hunger, he confessed to killing her, hiding her body in a haystack and feeding on it.

Lutska remembers swollen children searching for weeds and mussels, and a worker appointed by the collective farm collecting bodies in a cart and taking them to a common grave at a cemetery. For that, he was given a ration of 0.5 kg of bread.

The 1933 crop was bountiful, but there were not enough people to harvest it. Grygoriy Petrovskiy came to visit the MTS briefly and asked about conditions in the villages and collective farms. His assistant took the information down. He then went to visit local villages and collective farms.

After his visit, a few train cars with grain arrived via Bila Tserkva station with an order to distribute to the collective farm as stealth baked bread. This way, people survived.

Notes