CHAPTER TWO
III. In the Homeland of Taras Shevchenko
"The village looks as if burnt down by fire."
T.SHEVCHENKO
"I HEAR THAT YOU are talking about the year '33. In our country things happened that God should forbid."
"Where do you come from?"
"I'm from Kyrylivka in the district of Vilshansky. Ever heard of it?"
"Isn't that where Shevchenko was born?"
"No, he was born in Moryntsi -- the village next to ours. I was working there, I knew all the villages. There is one called Zelena Dibrova, and there, out of 1210 households, only 367 remained."
"And the rest -- the people died?"
"Some died, others escaped, and the village became almost deserted. There is another called Borovykivka, where 123 households survived out of more than six hundred. The village of Tarasivka in the district of Zvenyhorodka is deserted now. In Moryntsi itself four hundred houses became vacant, and in Kyrylivka only a half remained."
"Was not the memory of Taras Hryhorovych at least respected?"
"What -- they . . . respect! People were carried off to the cemetery there just as anywhere else, several bodies in a wagon. Activists were even found here, too, among our own people. They served well enough, until they themselves . . . "
And T-ko went on to tell us how in the village of Moryntsi the foreman of the kolhosp "brigade," Petro Tkachenko, in order to save time for more fruitful journeys of the wagon, insisted on the transport to the cemetery of all those already too weak to stand. "They'll die in any case, so why stand on ceremony," he would say. His obedient agents did as they were ordered, and later they carried Tkachenko away himself to the same common grave.
"In Vilshana, in the kolhosp "The Red Way," Fedir Tynyka of the fifth "brigade" threw into the grave an old woman, Olena Vakulenko. She was still alive at the time he, beast that he was, tossed her into the grave. All the blame for this rests upon Anikin Musienko, a party man, who was in charge of the removal of the dead to the cemetery."
" . . . The spring that year was rainy," our companion continued, "and weeds grew to the height of a man. By the roadside, between Kyrylivka and Budyshcha, in the orrach near the Budyshcha pond, at the end of June were found the bodies of two children - one about seven years old and the other perhaps ten. Who knows whose children they were? No body seemed to have missed them, no one asked for them, they perished like kittens . . . "