On the occasion of today’s debate in the German parliament on the so-called Holodomor, DW spoke with Lyubov Yaros, a survivor of the Great Famine in Ukraine in 1932/3.
She sits on the couch at home and unravels one thread after another. Her sight and hearing do not help her at all, but her energy is unstoppable. He continues to weave camouflage nets for the Ukrainian army, which is fighting against Russia. 102-year-old Lyubov Yaros lives in the village of Kontorkov. He was born in 1920 in the neighboring village of Pustelnki in the Zhytomyr region.
Lyubov’s family was considered well-to-do. They owned chickens, pigs, cows and horses. But then everything was confiscated by the communist regime of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Stalin as part of the collectivization program implemented at that time to create the cooperative farms (kolkhozes) as they were called.
In 1933, at the beginning of the Holodomor, as the Ukrainians called the great famine that occurred at the time, Lyubov was only 13 years old. The mass starvation artificially organized by the Soviet leadership in 1932-3 was intended to force Ukrainian peasants to join these cooperatives and at the same time to break up the national resistance movement. In 1931 thousands of intellectuals were exiled to Siberia.
The debate about the Holodomor and the persecutions began after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. It was not until 2006 that the Ukrainian parliament officially recognized the famine in Ukraine as a genocide, while according to Ukrainian historians nearly four million people died. in the 1930s as a direct and indirect consequence of the famine. Today, following the request of four parliamentary groups, the German parliament is expected to recognize the Holodomor as genocide.
“We had nothing to eat”
“The stale bread was not enough, and there was no fresh bread. Anyone who had potatoes would peel them so that sprouts remained on the skins, which were planted so that at least there would be potatoes,” Lubov recalls. “We had nothing to eat.” In order to survive, people made cookies from linden blossoms and nettles, tea from turnips. Her hands and feet were swollen from malnutrition. “I had bad wounds and could not walk. My father used to carry me outside,” says the 102-year-old, who had hallucinations at night and her parents were afraid she wouldn’t last.
“Many children starved to death,” said Lubov, who survived the nightmare. “Children were dying at home. The men with their little strength collected the dead children from house to house, put them in a wagon and buried them all together.” She experienced this tragedy in her family as well. Her older brother Mikaylo was beaten to death by a patrol while out looking for turnips while her younger sister Olya starved to death. “We had a cemetery nearby. My father took his eldest son and buried him there,” she says with tears in her eyes, noting that both her brothers were buried naked and without a coffin.
The animals in the famous kolkhozes also died of starvation, but that was not all, as the communists poisoned the animals so that people wouldn’t eat them, says the survivor. For decades no one dared to speak about these heinous acts, as the fear of imprisonment prevailed.
World War II and the war in Ukraine
Lubov survived the Holodomor and World War II. Twice the Nazis tried to send her to forced labor, but she managed to escape. “They took me with them to Germany but I left. When they wanted to turn me back, I took a knife, cut my arms and chest and poured salt on it. With such wounds they left me alone.”
When the Second World War broke out, Lyubov Yaros was a girl. He worked on a kolkhoz, in a sawmill where he also learned how to farm a field with a tractor as the men went off to fight against Nazi Germany. At this age she herself experiences another war between Russia and Ukraine. “This is the worst war. God forbid, no one would wish for such a war,” she says.
Three of her grandsons are volunteering at the front while she helps as best she can by making camouflage nets. “Boys have to hide underneath so no one can get them,” she says. She watches the news every day, wishing all the soldiers to return soon, while hoping for the victory of Ukraine. “We have been through so much, hunger and cold. And we always have to suffer. We are waiting for victory, but I want to catch this victory” he confesses.
DW – Irina Ukina/ Iosifina Tsagalidou
Read the News today and get the latest news.
Follow Skai.gr on Google News and be the first to know all the news.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
