Holodomor Child

The wind blew strong, the powerful odour of dead bodies hanging in the air. I, Bohuslava, stood at four feet eleven inches on the edge of the curb, red coat flapping in the breeze. The street was desolate and full of pain, the road lined with the dead bodies of Kiev Oblasts starved residents. Women and children staggered along the pavement in search for food, bones protruding from places they previously had not.

My mother stood behind me waiting patiently for me to carry on walking. Her frame was slender, hips narrow, bust small, but she was nothing more than skin and bones now, spine like an iron rod. She placed a hand on my shoulder encouraging me to move forward. I stepped gently off the pavement, foot coming to land in a puddle. The water rapidly soaked through my worn leather shoe drenching my stocking and making my feet feel even more unclean than they did already. My mother followed.

The wind picked up as we made our way down the almost empty street, small white flakes falling from the grey sky above coming carefully to rest on the dry ground. The buildings on either side of the road were high, three or four storeys at a minimum. My mother and I had taken residence behind an old bank having lost our home in the country five months ago, my once convalescent father had taken a turn for the worst in the late summer leaving us with little money.  His funeral costs bankrupt us forcing us to leave our small village in the north of the oblast for the city.

We had arrived in the metropolis during early autumn unsure of how the famine had affected the area, unfortunately more than we had anticipated. My previously slightly larger than average self-had since dwindled leaving me puny and small, knee caps protuberant, collar bones like metal bars, and face gaunt. My brother, Valentyn, too looked rather emaciated.

Out of the three of us my brother had changed the most. He had once been stout, stomach bulging over the edge of his trousers, but since the beginning of the rations and through the starvation he had dropped the weight of four new born babies, now coming to an unhealthy mass of four stone ten pounds. His face had been podgy, his hands large, but this had been replaced by an undernourished boy of which I was unused to seeing.

The snow began to fall thick and fast covering the bodies lying in heaps on the path. I looked around as I walked, the same poster adorning every brick wall. The advertisement read “To eat your own children is a barbarian act”, it had been printed by the Soviet regime after the evidence of cannibalism had been documented.

My mother had over taken me in our walk, the heels of her shabby leather shoes flicking snow up behind her. I followed her around the corner of a red brick building, a half-eaten body sitting eyes open resting against a wall. A large group of people stood huddled together just down the alley way, four of whom I recognised. We made our way over and joined them. I couldn’t catch what they were saying, partly due to the fact they were speaking at an abnormal speed but also due to the language. Russian I think they were speaking. I listened carefully in an attempt to pick out words, three I caught overall. “Plan, Quickly, Him”. My Russian wasn’t superb; Velentyn however was fluent in it. He’d bought himself a dictionary on his sixteenth birthday two years ago and had spent much of his time teaching himself the words, word by word, section by section until he could string together sentences.

The group slowly diminished in size until only six of us remained, my mother, four others who had also taken residence behind the old bank and me, the youngest out of the lot. As we walked south in the direction of the building we called home Ukrainian was beginning to be vocalized again, the details of the previous conversation being spoken about in the utmost detail.

A plan had been made to steal food from a ration centre in the middle of the city, the largest centre in the Ukrainian SSR. One man would distract the person at the counter, another the people working inside, and the others would steal the food, hiding it in amongst their clothing, now too big. Carrying out the plan would be risky, but the excitement was building up inside me like a young child on Christmas morning.

We soon neared the bank, the sky darkening as we made our way through the alleys which connected the streets. The hollow in the wall was now visible, my brother sat wrapped in a cloth blanket just inside the archway. I ran towards him, sitting down gently beside him and nestling my head into his side to keep warm. The rest of the group came together around us, holding hands, sharing blankets all in an effort to avoid becoming too cold. It took me forever to get to sleep, the wind howling loudly as the town clock struck midnight. Even though the sound of the wind was overpowering it was trying to contain my excitement about the following week’s plan that was the real thing preventing me from sleeping. I eventually drifted off at about one am unaware of the struggles we would face in the morning.

The week passed by slowly, my stomach grumbling loudly at every available opportunity as if it were a young toddler screaming out for food. Adam, the eldest member of our group had collapsed on the Thursday, his corpse now rotting with the rest.

The 24 hours leading up to the plan, which we had since named, “Operation Rumbling Stomach” (spoken in Russian of course), taking place were the hardest hours I had endured. My body had not been fed for five days, my legs were weak, and my heart palpitated.

In the afternoon of February 12th, 1933, at precisely 2:13 pm, a group of nine stood together outside the ration centre, hair being blown about in the strong winds. Marko, the leader, stood tall in his dark brown overcoat, issuing orders to different members of the group. My mother, Olena, would distract the man on the counter, Marko, the people working inside and I would gather bread and grain in my pockets.  

My mother joined the queue for the centre, now fairly short due to the time of day. We waited on the pavement outside, ankle deep in the snow that had barely stopped falling during the past week. I shivered. The queue moved slowly. Twenty minutes had passed, my mother now second in the line, five more people behind her.

Once she got to the front she began shouting in Russian, distracting the man on the counter and the people surrounding her. Marko and the rest of us moved in slowly. My mother kept yelling. Marko too began bellowing, calling out to the people working inside. The other six and I ran quickly into the store room behind the counter, pulling and grabbing things from the shelves to store in our huge pockets. “Dopomozhitʹ meni, dopomohty nam” screamed Marko, the Ration centre workers hurrying around him.

My pockets were soon full, grain poking out the seams. As soon as I couldn’t fit anymore in I made a dash for the exit, the others following swiftly behind me. Once out the last person yelled to Marko alerting him to the fact we were leaving, he and my mother joined the back of the crowd, running as fast as our legs could carry us. We were soon out of sight.

We turned down an alleyway, still running to avoid being caught. I soon fell to the back of the group, heart pounding, head spinning. My legs began to feel heavy, moving as if they had minds of their own. I couldn’t carry on. I came to a steady halt, knees shaking as I leant backwards against a wall. I stood still as a statue, trying to slow my heart rate. My heart began to slow, palpitating as it did so. An intense feeling of light-headedness over took my body as I sank down to the floor. As my lower back hit the ground it was almost as if my body stopped speaking to me, my lungs roared, the sound of my heart beating and blood rushing around my body amplified in my head.

With eye lids heavy, and body weak I let my eyes close, my head come to rest on my shoulder. My heart rate slowed quickly after that until I could sit up no more. Lying on my side in the alleyway with grain in my pockets I gasped for breath, chest so tight I could barely breathe. My rib cage dug into the floor, pain consuming me. It was at that moment my body ceased communication with my mind, heart beat coming to a standstill, lungs emptying, skin greying, and body temperature dropping. My stomach remained empty, unfed, but somebody else would find the grain in my pockets, and fill their empty stomach instead. My tiny frame lay cold and motionless, on the hard concrete, snow still falling, forming a blanket around me, for I, Bohuslava, was now just a body, rotting in with the rest.