Execution by Hunger (22 page)

A
T THE END of 1932 when all the vegetables and bread had been consumed news reached the villages of our region that special stores had been opened in the county town with plenty of everything. It was even rumored that foreign goods were available there. However, we also learned that the only medium of exchange for these goods was foreign currency and gold or silver, the latter two in any form or quantity.

Little by little, more information about these stores trickled into our village. The stores were known under the name of Torgsin, which is an abbreviation of the Russian words for “trade with foreigners.” It was said that this store was selling all the necessities of life: groceries, clothing, medicines, and so forth.

We knew that Torgsin had existed for sometime now, but only in the large metropolitan cities where many foreigners lived. Now, these stores were coming to us. Yet, as unsophisticated as we were, the aim of the Soviet government was clear to us. These stores were intended to strip us of the last remnants of our gold and silver. Family heirlooms such as crosses, icons, earrings, wedding bands, watches, and anything else that might have contained some precious metal were much coveted by the regime. The Communist government, suspecting that the farmers still possessed gold and silver coins from prerevolutionary times, wanted to get hold of them. For generations, families had accumulated such treasures as silver teapots, sugar bowls, cream pitchers, salt and pepper shakers, and other silver pieces. It used to be a fashionable custom among young village women to have one of their upper front teeth crowned with gold whether or not it was dentally needed. The government wanted these too.

Hunger accomplished everything that decrees and threats could not. The last reserves of precious metals, meager as they were, were pried or dug out from their hiding places. They became the only means of survival.

To own gold was now everybody's dream; it became synonymous with life itself. Gold could buy bread…just imagine. Even we lowly villagers could buy bread, and plenty of it very easily if we only had that magic gold. But the question was how and where to get it? A few of us had some, but the majority had never even seen it.

As the news about this fabulous store spread, we began to hear horror stories about armed robberies and murders. Wearing gold jewelry openly, or having a gold tooth, was flirting with death. Murders committed for a pair of earrings, or a ring, or whatever else was made of gold or looked like gold, soon became everyday occurences. A girl lost her finger along with her ring when the robber who was unable to remove the gold ring simply cut off her finger. Thieves armed with tongs would forcibly extract the teeth from those who had gold crowns. These crimes had a tremendous demoralizing impact on our lives.

Gold fever resulted in the complete destruction of our cemetery. Our village was very old; its beginnings dated back to the sixteenth century. Through all those three centuries or more, our cemetery had been the burial place for people from all walks of life: the prominent and rich as well as the common farmer. It was the custom to bury the dead with all their personal possessions such as jewelry, weapons, and crosses. Now, the graves were opened and looted of all the valuables they contained. At first, the grave plundering took place secretly at night, but soon, it was done openly in broad daylight. There actually was no need of hiding this horrendous crime for the government did not mind the pillaging of graves. Nobody was ever punished for this crime as far as I know. The cemeteries, after all, were looked upon as a part of religious tradition, something the Communists were bent on destroying. So, like the church and the independent farmers, our cemetery had to go; grave robberies were officially ignored and tolerated, if not actually encouraged.

In many cases, the remains of the buried were desecrated after the graves had been dug up. One could see human skulls and bones scattered all over the cemetery, and the plots which once held them were torn up, leaving empty, gaping holes. Even the wooden crosses marking the graves were carried off and used as firewood.

The cemetery looting turned out to be of some use: the opened graves soon received new bodies; the victims of starvation. This was a bizarre stroke of good fortune, since the starving villagers did not have sufficient strength to dig new graves for their dead relatives and neighbors. Now they only had to drag their bodies to the cemetery and drop them into the looted open graves.

There were a few villagers who had some pieces of precious metal in hiding and could realize their dream of trading it for food. We happened to be among those lucky ones. One evening my mother revealed her secret to us: she had two gold medallions. They had been her parents' presents to her when she was still single, some half century ago, or more than thirty years before the October Revolution. At that time, it was the fashion for young women to wear gold coins as medallions. Mother no longer wore her most precious possessions, but kept them well-hidden for a rainy day. Even her children, knew nothing of their existence. We were in the direst of straits. The famine by this time was reaching its height; we had to have some food if we were to stay alive. Mother asked us, as she always did in important matters, as to the best way, in our opinion, to utilize these medallions. We decided unanimously that we should take one of them to the closest Torgsin in the county capital. We agreed to make this trip as soon as possible, for the snow had not yet sealed off our village completely. Later on, the intensity of the winter elements would make it impossible for us to leave the village at all.

One morning in late January 1933, while it was still dark, Mother and I set out along the main street through the center of the village for the county town. We followed the street to the main road which led straight into the town.

It was a memorable trip. Soon the sun rose and started to shine in all its brilliance in the vast blue sky with the white snow cover reflecting its light. The landscape was very calm and silent. We met nothing that was alive: there were no birds, cats, or dogs; not even their traces in the snow signaling life. And we didn't meet a single human being. I had the eerie sensation that we were indeed walking in the kingdom of death.

The only sign that people were still alive was the smoke rising from distant chimneys. However, not many houses showed this signal. The majority of them, buried in deep snow drifts, hid the horrible sight of their inhabitants suffering and dying from starvation.

Soon, however, as we slowly made our way through the snow toward the village center, graphic evidence of starvation became visible. We noticed a black object which, from afar, looked like a snow-covered tree stump. As we came near, however, we saw that it was the body of a dead man. Frozen limbs protruding from under the snow gave the body the appearance of some grotesque creature. I bent down and cleared the snow off the face. It was Ulas, our elderly neighbor whom we had last seen about a month ago.

A few steps further, we saw another frozen body. It was the corpse of a woman. As I brushed away the snow, horror made my blood turn cold: under her ragged coat, clutched tightly to her bosom with her stiff hands, was the frozen little body of her baby.

We finally left our village behind and stepped onto the open road which led to the county seat. However, another ghostly panorama now opened in front of us. Everywhere we looked dead and frozen bodies lay by the sides of the road. To our right were bodies of those villagers who apparently had tried to reach the town in search of work and food. Weakened by starvation, they were unable to make it and ended up lying or falling down by the roadside, never to rise again. The gentle snow mercifully covered their bodies with its white blanket.

One could easily imagine the fate of those people whose bodies were lying to our left. They most probably were returning from the county town, without having accomplished anything. They had tramped many kilometers in vain, only to be refused a job and a chance to stay alive. They were returning home empty-handed. Death caught up with them as they trudged homeward, resigned to dying in their village.

The wide open kolhosp fields, stretching for kilometers on both sides of the main road, looked like a battlefield after a great war. Littering the fields were the bodies of the starving farmers who had been combing the potato fields over and over again in the hope of finding at least a fragment of a potato that might have been overlooked or left over from the last harvest. They died where they collapsed in their endless search for food. Some of those frozen corpses must have been lying out there for months. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to cart them away and bury them.

The actual seven miles' distance to the town proved to be very laborious for us. After we left our village, a cold wind started blowing from the north, and clouds appeared on the horizon. It was difficult, especially for Mother, to walk against the wind, but we stubbornly persisted, and after about six hours of struggle with the wind and snow-covered road, we arrived at the entrance to the county town. Here yet another horror awaited us.

Our county seat at that time had no sewage system, and the raw sewage was collected, usually at night, by a special sanitary brigade. There was no special dumping ground for the cargo of the horse-drawn sewage tanks. They were usually emptied outside of town, along the sides of the roads. The road from our village to the county seat seemed to have been their favorite dumping ground; consequently, both sides of the road for a considerable stretch were thickly covered with raw sewage. This was in itself, a most distasteful sight and unpleasant in normal times, but we had become used to it. Now, as we slowly trudged along these littered roadsides, our stomachs turned over anew. Scattered here and there throughout the sewage were frozen corpses. They were lying singly or in groups, or just piled up one on top of another, like debris after a disaster. Some were covered with snow, showing only arms and legs protruding; others were covered by freshly dumped raw sewage. The infants were invariably pressed to their mothers' bosoms under the cover of homemade coats.

These dead were farmers from the neighboring villages and their families, all victims of starvation. Deprived of all means of existence, the farmers saw their only chance of survival in escaping to the city where they hoped to find some job, some food, and some help. Despite the prohibitions on leaving the boundaries of their villages, they moved in throngs to the county seat, swelling and annoying its population and the city management. They appeared on the doorsteps of houses, begging for a crumb of bread, or even a piece of potato peel, usually in vain. The city inhabitants, with their own meager food rations, could not give the villagers sufficient food to save them from starvation. There were simply too many of them. They were standing or lying in the city streets, in the marketplaces, at the railroad stations, under fences, in backyards, in the ditches by the streets and roads. They became such everyday sights that the city people mostly passed them by, ignoring them and their pleas. Thus, after fruitlessly trying everything and going everywhere, the villagers and their families met their inevitable deaths. The dead lay undiscovered or ignored for days, like driftwood.

Often the starving people would be rounded up like cattle by the militiamen, taken beyond the city limits, and left to their fate. The dead, and those barely alive and unable to walk anymore, were all loaded onto trucks or horse-driven carts, and hauled away somewhere outside the city limits. They were dumped into ravines or in the dumping grounds for sewage along the roadsides. Weren't these people entitled to at least a decent burial in the cemetery, even in common graves?

When mother and I finally arrived at the Torgsin, there was already a great crowd of starving people there. Emaciated and skeletonlike, or with swollen, puffed-up bodies, human beings stood around in the streets, leaned against the telephone poles and walls, or lay on the sidewalks and in the street gutters. They were patiently waiting for some merciful shoppers to share a pittance of their purchases with them. Others were begging noisily, shouting and crying; the rest held out their hands quietly and silently. Here and there among the crowds we could see rigid bodies of the dead, but nobody paid any attention to them….

We were informed at the entrance to the Torgsin that all shoppers were required to first go to the office across the street for an appraisal of their valuables. Having found the office, we were directed to an official inside. The official, a fat man behind iron grates, took Mother's medallion without even looking at us, weighed it quickly, and tossed it into a drawer. He then handed us a form, requiring our name, address, and the type of our valuable. Afterwards, we received a receipt indicating the sum we were authorized to spend: exactly 18 rubles. Another hour passed as we stood in line waiting to enter the Torgsin. Finally we were inside.

What a sight it was. I could not believe my eyes; it was like a dream. Here was everything we needed and more. There were things we had never even heard of nor seen in our lives. There were even groceries known to me only from books I had read. All the items were tastefully arranged and exhibited in cases under glass. Looking at these splendid assortments of foods, I began to feel dizzy. For months, I hadn't even seen ordinary food. I had forgotten the taste of real bread. Now, everywhere I looked were these wonderful things to eat.

I was completely overcome by hunger pangs; they were so violent that I could hardly manage to stand upright. Savage hunger gnawed at my stomach, and there was a choking sensation in my throat, as if someone's hands were squeezing and twisting my neck. In my agony, I was about to burst out crying, but at that moment, I felt my mother's hands on my shoulders. She understood my emotional state. Perhaps she felt the same way. As I looked at her, she smiled at me and said: “Have some pride, my son!” These words calmed me and gave me strength to overcome the physical weakness.

We decided to buy only the basic and most essential products, so, when our turn came at the counter, we quickly selected what we needed without much hesitation and difficulty. We bought some butter, salt pork, lard, two loaves of bread, sugar, and a few miscellaneous items to make up exactly 18 rubles. Most of these items were neatly packed in cans, boxes or bags. To our astonishment, we discovered that the labels on all of them bore the trade mark “Made in
USSR
,” meaning they were destined for foreign markets.