Zhanna KRYZHANOVSKA

(Dnipro, Ukraine)

Zanna KRYZHANOVSKA, daughter of the repressed Mykola Bereslavsky:
«TEACHERS ASKED STUDENTS FOR FOOD»

In our family, we were very aware of the Holodomor. In my father’s family, they experienced hunger, but it wasn’t a fatal famine. My grandmother, for as long as she lived, would cry and say, ‘They say there wasn’t a famine, but there certainly was…’. At that time, people stayed silent about it. My father (born in 1924, so he was nine years old at the time) remembered how the teachers were starving, sitting with swollen legs, and asking students if their parents could send them something to eat. His mother would send cooked beets to the teachers. This memory stayed with him vividly.
Not all the teachers at the school were locals, and some had no households of their own, which made things worse, especially during the active collectivization period.
By that time, my grandmother already had three children. I cannot recall this story without tears: ‘It was early spring. I heard children coming and singing «Rozpryahajte, khloptsi, koni» (a traditional Ukrainian folk song). I looked out the window—it was still cold and wet. The children were in rags, a brother and sister, clearly with begging bags, stood outside the windows and sang, asking for alms. But how can you sing when you’re a hungry child, when you have no parents? And I had nothing to give them. I went to the garden, where only some onions and garlic had just started to sprout. I picked a few stalks and gave them to the children. They immediately sat down by the window and began dividing them…’
If you go through this, or even just let it pass through your heart, you will never forget it—and you will never be able to forgive.
When I worked at the institute, there was an order to gather testimonies about the Holodomor. The Ukrainian language study center, which I headed, was responsible for this. Testimonies from across the region began to come in, collected from teachers, villagers, and eyewitnesses who still remembered the famine. Children were involved in gathering this material. As we read about this horror, we were overwhelmed with anger, pain, and indignation. The question arose: why did our people, eternal farmers on their fertile land, perish from hunger during what was, in principle, a productive year?
The fear was still deeply rooted: elderly people asked that their names not be mentioned under their testimonies. And this was already in our time, in independent Ukraine, yet people were still afraid of punishment, so strong was the terror ingrained in them. Some of these testimonies about the Holodomor were published with the support of the regional department of public education.
I remember my grandmother telling me about a case of cannibalism in their village. It’s horrifying even to imagine—a mother killed her six-year-old son. What level of desperation must people have been driven to, to kill the maternal instinct? I posed to myself a moral question: where does such a person end up—in hell as a child murderer, or in heaven as a martyr?
When my father relied on some information, it was never baseless. He ordered academic books from Moscow and Kyiv, which were printed in only a few thousand copies for the entire Soviet Union. For example, I have Essays on Population Statistics (Gosstatizdat). He was very interested in the demographic situation in Ukraine—where and how it had changed. Another book he ordered from Moscow while studying the issue of the Holodomor was Foreign Trade of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1966. He compared how much food was sold in 1932-33, and in this book, there is information for each product year by year. It was difficult to argue with my father when he proved something because he always operated with facts.
Regarding demography, the Soviet Union conducted a population census in 1926 and 1939. Other republics showed a population increase, but in Ukraine, there was a decline. Then, there was a sharp increase in the number of Russians, literally within a few years, because whole families from the Russian non-black-earth regions were resettled into villages that had been decimated by famine. We knew such families in our village…
How much has our people endured in just the 20th century? There must be deep reasons for this, and my father often asked himself such questions. He found answers in Shevchenko:
«Break the chains, brotherhood unite!
Do not seek, do not ask
In a foreign land
For what cannot be found
Neither in the heavens nor in the fields.
In your own home, there is truth,
And strength, and freedom.»
My father knew Shevchenko well, and so do I. Most people read «Kateryna» or «Naymychka,» which are about more domestic matters. But the true Shevchenko, the one who needs to be understood, is found in his major poems like «To the Dead, the Living, and the Unborn,» «The Dream,» and «The Caucasus.»
In our family, we held Shevchenko readings, with a large portrait of him hanging above the table with the words: «Study, read, and learn from others, but do not forget your own.» I often repeated these words to my students, hoping they would resonate in their hearts. Many of my graduates still keep in touch with me through social media, and I value these long-lasting relationships.
However, I rarely told them about my father, thinking it would be immodest. After all, it wasn’t my achievement. Many students didn’t know that my father was a repressed political prisoner.