Full Name in Ukrainian: Людмила Василівна Дубинська
Full Name in English: Liudmyla Dubinska
Data of Birth: 1927
Place of Birth: Rososha
Raion: Lypovets raion
Oblast: Vinnytsia oblast
Country: Ukraine
Copy of original: Yes
Envelope: Yes
Number of pages: 4
Keywords: Ukraine--History--Famine, 1932-1933--Personal narratives; Famines--Ukraine--History--Sources; Famine victims; Holodomor; Голодомор;
trauma; cow; cannibalism; ration; food substitution; stealing; sharing; search brigade; burial; burial brigade; buried alive; mortality
Notes: Abridged letter is published in 33: holod. Narodna Knyha-Memorial book, Kyiv: Radiansky pysmennyk, 1991, p. 113
Liudmyla Dubinska was six at the time of the Holodomor. She recalls the events that took place in her native village of Rososha, Lypovets raion, Vinnytsia oblast.
Liudmyla had a sister, whose age Liudmyla does not specify. Their father worked as a mechanic at a paper factory. He was given a ration at work which he never brought home because he gave it away to other people’s children on his way home, to the disappointment of his own daughters. Dubinska’s father believed that their family was lucky because they had a good cow and some wheat cereal (kulish). He also took milk to work to feed the firemen, who were otherwise too weak to keep the fire going to produce steam.
Liudmyla also recalls how a search brigade found a small bag of flour hidden in their stove during the search. They took it away. Dubinska’s mother with a friend was sneaking into the fields to collect unripe grain spikelets despite the objections of her husband. He knew that people were killed on the spot if caught stealing any grain.
Dubinska describes how starvation reduced some people to “half-human” who ate dead animals and human meat. She remembers seeing heads without bodies along a fence. Liudmyla believes that those who fed on meat of humans and dead animals died in the end because they were “eaten by infection” while those who ate weeds were more likely to survive. However, mortality in her village was such that most houses were left empty.
The person named Denys was appointed to collect the dead bodies in Rososha. He would also pick up some people who were still alive. On one occasion, someone helped a woman to crawl out of a grave and she lived. Denys had vested interest in picking up as many bodies as possible, whether they belonged to the dead or still living people, because he was given bread for his work. Even so, many dead bodies were left in the houses for a week or even longer. There were so many that even Denys could not cope with collecting all the dead bodies.
Liudmyla’s husband’s father and two brothers died during the Holodomor. He and his mother survived because he was given half-liter of milk daily for his work as a cow shepherd. After fighting in WWII, he came home gravely wounded and with chronic pneumonia. He became disabled and paralyzed at old age. His and Liudmyla’s fates – experiencing starvation in childhood, war as youths and hard labor their whole life, took a toll on their health. But Liudmyla’s grandchildren do not believe that things could have been that bad for their grandmother’s generation. This should not have been possible because Ukraine is such a bountiful land, and the people are so hardworking.
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