"They said that grain is being taken to the Urals, where there is currently a hunger strike"

In the first months of the Holodomor, “red rolls” were organized by pods

My mother, Frosina Andriivna, was born in 1903 in the nearby village of Vyshnopoli. We went to visit my older married sister in Legedzyn, until we met my father – Yakov Prokopovich Listyanko, born in 1892. He managed to fight on the fronts of the First World War. The couple had two children – me and my brother Oleksii. My father was a good man, my brother and I were never hit in my whole life. Mom, however, was a little scared when we disobeyed.

With the approach of the front, the Germans drove young people to the west. Brother Oleksii was also taken away. Together with boys from the same village, he was chased on foot all the way to Western Ukraine. There he told the boys that he would run away. When the police discovered that one person had escaped, they went on horseback to search. After some time they returned. No one saw the brother again. After the war, we filed a search warrant, his full namesake responded, and his brother was missing.

In 1932, we lived on the very edge of Legedzyny, on Novoselytsia Street. I just went to the first grade of the local school. In the winter of 1932–1933, there was already little food, and she had just finished her studies in the spring when the real famine began. My brother went to a crèche in the village, which in rural terms was called maidan. I took him from there. Once a group of children went with us. Among them was the neighbor girl Parasya. Suddenly a woman came out of the house. Her and her mother’s street name was Bombykhamy. She started tweeting to us and inviting us to the house. My brother and I did not go, but Parasya did. In the evening, her parents ran to us, they say that their daughter has not returned. We talked about everything, because we are children. They rushed there and found a head wrapped in a little dress in the attic, and there was cooked meat in the oven.

People began to carry that brew around the house, to show it off. Both Bombys were dragged out into the street and began to be beaten by the whole village. They would have been killed if someone from the village council had not come and taken them away. After that incident, no one saw them in the village again.

Immediately after that, the father abandoned that house in Novoselytsa and hired a job in the center of the village, because they were very afraid for the children. We were ordered not to visit anyone. We lived in two halves in the new house: we lived in one, and grandmother Tyopka and her daughter Domnyka lived in the other. I remembered well that Domnyka had six fingers and six toes. Even then they were bloated with hunger. We were saved by the cow we had. Mother and the cow went to work every day. They yoked our cow on one side, and the neighbor’s cow on the other. And the job was to take the dead to the cemetery. They went into houses, picked them up on the streets. For this, the collective farm was given a kilo of waste every day. They were ground, birch leaves were added, fried and eaten. Birch has leaves on one side, it has no taste at all. Such loaves did not last long, so my mother baked them on cabbage leaves or burdock root. Then the burdock was plucked, and this bread was eaten.

They were harassed by komnezami. They walked around the village with iron sticks and pushed the ground in the yards. Especially where it was violated – both in the garden and in houses. Back in Novoselitsa, my mother hid a bucketful of grain in the attic. He was immediately found and taken away. They said that grain is being taken to the Urals, where there is currently a hunger strike. They lied because there was no famine there. In the first months of the Holodomor, “red rolls” were organized by pods. Then they were gone, because there was nothing to take away. The landlady and her daughter Domnyka died.

They started to feed already in the late autumn of 1933, it became easier. The father immediately returned to his house in Novoselytsia. In the school where my brother and I studied, there were not many children for a long time – six or eight in a class. And in a few years it was full again.

In 1939, I finished seven classes and went to study in the neighboring village of Talyanki. There was a high school there. She finished the eighth grade in the spring of 1940. In the spring of 1941, the district inspected our collective farm “Joint Labor”, where my father was a storekeeper. A shortage of 10 tons of barley was discovered. The police came to our house and took my dad away. They also arrested the head of the collective farm Kostya Levents and accountant Volodymyr Magalyas. Everyone was taken to Uman. Confiscation of all property was ordered. Since there was nothing to confiscate, they took away a cow and a sewing machine. Mom quarreled a lot and called the confiscators names. She was also taken to prison for this.

My brother, 14-year-old Oleksiy, and I were left alone – we have no parents, no cow, and no sewing machine. And they continued to go to school in Talyanka. Potatoes, which were not confiscated, came to the rescue. Then the war started. Our confiscated cow, along with other collective farm cattle, was chased across the Dnipro River, and we never saw her again. All the villagers were ordered to dig trenches to hide from German bombs. As soon as Oleksiy and I dug a hole and put some sticks on top, my mother came from prison. And my father was taken all the way to the Rostov region. There, the head of the collective farm and the accountant were taken to the army, and the father was released because they had been disabled since the First World War. So they walked home from there, and they came as late as the summer of 1942. At that time I was no longer at home – I went to Austria as an ostarbeiterka. To tell the truth, we did not run away from that job, because our headman Tanasiy Gontar said that we would work in Germany in the spring and summer, because there is not enough labor, and in the fall we would return to Legedzyn. In Austria, I suffered – I was seriously ill and starved.

At first, we – four girls from Legedzyny – were brought to a farm in Austria in the family of Karl and Rosa Krakufer. The work was familiar – they worked in the field and did not starve. It was not as terrible here as during the Holodomor. In my hundred years of life, I have seen everything, but the Holodomor was the most terrible event. Much scarier than war.

Later, the girls were sent somewhere else, and I was left alone. The son of these Austrians fought, sometimes came, had a family and lived separately from his parents. He died near Stalingrad in the fall of 1942. The landlady was so angry with me that she passed out. As if I killed him. They put up with me a little more and later took me to the stock exchange. A lot of us gathered there, but no one took us. In the end, they were loaded into wagons and taken through Vienna to the city of Wiener Neustadt. There was an aircraft factory for the production of “Messerschmitt” fighters.

The camp had a high gate and a double barbed wire fence. They slept on bunk beds without mattresses and pillows. They gave us balanda with kohlrabi – something between cabbage and beetroot. When it was cooked, it stank. In a word, they give us that balanda in cardboard disposable bowls, and we just got it from the owner, we turn our noses up, we don’t eat it, we pour it out. Despite the fact that I am tall, I weighed 50 kilograms at that aircraft factory. The work was like this: every day a soldier with a machine gun (a German machine gun. – Country) took us 2 kilometers to the milling machine workshop. There we hammered the solution for cooling the milling cutter. Unlike the Germans, we did not have a lunch break – we had to clean the premises from metal shavings. They didn’t sweep the whole lot, but by factions: larger to larger, smaller to smaller. After lunch, the products were packed into boxes. The German workers, especially the older ones, tried to bring us food – they gave us pieces of bread smeared with either butter or jam. We divided each piece into four parts – for everyone.

Later, I got sick: bumps broke out on my face, they dried up, and ooze oozed out of them. I was placed in the camp hospital and discharged. They took me to the labor exchange again. Everyone was sorted out, but no one would take me, thin and tall. In the end, one person came with a horse-truck and took all the rejected people, somewhere around a dozen people. Furman was silent all the way, and when he brought him to the yard, he commanded: “Now get off!” We understood that the Pole. Franek spoke German better than some Austrians. Later, the landlady’s maid brought us food – an enamel bucket of macaroni. Out of hunger, we threshed it all at once. The owner came, appointed me a cook and told me to follow him. I collected a bucket of potatoes in the cellar and baked them in the oven. All night we got up to those potatoes and ate them, and in the morning the German brought half a liter of milk per person. Our faces and hands swelled from overeating. The fingers became rough, it was impossible to get hold of anything.

In 1945, we were released. The girls went to Budapest, and then home, and I stayed because I was literate, finished nine grades and had to be a clerk in a military unit. She sat until July and returned to Peter and Paul on the 12th.

Subsequently, she studied at the Uman Teacher’s Institute. She entered twice: first she passed the exams and went to the first year of the physics and mathematics faculty, but the Minister of Education Pavlo Tychyna issued a retroactive decree ordering the exclusion of all students who do not have 10 classes of education. They counted me out and organized annual preparatory courses. Instead of two years, I studied for three and graduated in 1948. I went to work on assignment in Oksanina. She taught physics and mathematics there, and when necessary, replaced the German language teacher. My vocabulary was sufficient for the fifth-sixth grades, because I knew the colloquial language. And for the seniors, she prepared seriously, sitting with a dictionary. Later, she graduated in absentia from the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute.

She married a paramedic, Hryhoriy Savovych, and moved to Legedzyn. They raised two children – Anatoly and Valery. None of them are in the world anymore. My husband died of a heart attack in 2005, although he was in good health, and I was ill.