The search brigades could easily discover grain hidden in the gardens because after the rain the ground would sink where someone had dug to bury the grain. Maria Isaienko was smart to bury a sack of corn by the shed’s wall and disguise that spot as a make-shift porch (pryzba). Nevertheless, her younger son Pavlusha died in the summer of 1933, and only the older son Vasyl survived. Maria recalled that whole families died out during the Holodomor. There were corpses lying on the roads, with no one to bury them. When the bodies were buried, there were up to 10 bodies put in each makeshift mass grave. About half of the population of the villages of Potiahailivka and Luchky died. After the Holodomor, there were a lot of empty houses in Luchky. The following year or so, a few families from Russia resettled in Luchky.

Isaienko wonders why the writers did not propose to create a commission for the investigation of the causes of the famine in Ukraine at “the Congress” (likely the Congress of the People’s Deputies). He mentions that he sent a telegram to the Congress and a letter to Ukrainian delegates and had high hopes for the writer Borys Oliinyk to raise this issue.

Isaienko also wrote letters to the Luchky village council and to the secretary and the head of the Communist party organization of Sokolivsky Soviet farm (radhosp) asking them to erect a monument in memory of the victims of the Holodomor. He received no response from them. He is asking Maniak for the account number of the Memorial society in Kyiv. He wants to transfer 10 rubles that his mother decided to donate out of her 45-ruble pension. (Memorial society in Ukraine was created in 1989 to memorialize the victims of political persecution in the 20th century and defend human rights. Volodymyr Maniak was the chair of the Ukrainian Memorial society at the time when he also chaired the editorial board of the memorial book 33ii:Holod).

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Isaienko’s parents moved to Luchky in 1929 from the neighboring village of Potaihailivka. They had to leave the village in 1964 because of construction of the Dniprodzerzhynska Hydro Power Plant (now Seredniodniprovska Hydro Power Plant). During the Holodomor, his father “ran away” to Dniprodzerzhynsk (now Kamianske, Dnipropetrovsk oblast) because he could get at least 100 gm of bread (ration) there. Isaienko’s mother with two sons stayed behind in the village.

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