Olena Lysyk (nee Stepanchenko)

OL - Our family escaped to the Donbas. We survived because we escaped before [the Famine]. My mother’s sister Khrystia, didn’t escape, and was sent to Solovky¹ with her five children, who all died there. They never returned. They were exiled before the Famine.

There was a very large state farm, which had once been the estate of a Russian landowner. They had tractors and my father was a good mechanic, so the director [of the state farm] kept him and got documents for him. So they didn’t disturb him, but often the NKVD came for “discussions” – had my father heard the tractor drivers complaining, and so forth? But my father said to them, “I’m a believer [in God]. It says so in my passport. I can’t be an informer.” And they left him alone, because he was needed [as a mechanic].

My mother and aunt couldn’t bring the corn home, because they would be arrested, so they sent me to collect the three cobs, and in the evening we ate them together. I remember once somebody caught a raven, so we plucked it and made a soup from that raven.

I was locked in the house, and I sat in the window waiting for my mother. My mother and father had to go to work, and they gave them a piece of bread there. When my mother came home for lunch she would give me a small piece of bread. Once, during the early spring, she took me with her to the city. She wanted to see her father, who had also been dukulakized and thrown out of his house.

Interviewer – Which city was this?

OL – This was Drushkivka, the same city [where we lived]. My grandfather was a beggar. He begged for help beside stores. I remember, he looked like St. Nicholas, and he gave me a bread crust. Two weeks after that, he died at the Drushkivka train station. He was buried in a hole without a coffin. They wrapped him in a cloth and buried him like that, because nobody had any money [for a coffin].