"Come in, grandma is already waiting," kindly says Mihail Domansky, son of Hana Domanska, who saw the Holodomor up close in 1932 and 1933. She told him a lot about the horrors of that great famine in Ukraine.
This 96-year-old woman is waiting in the room, there are embroidered pillows on the beds, and family photos on the walls.
Hana Domanska still lives alone in the village of Severini in the Khmeljnica region, which today has barely two hundred inhabitants. Her son often visits her, brings groceries or goes to town with her. But Domanska still feels most comfortable in her home, where she was born and raised.
Expulsion, deportation and persecution
She was only five years old when the Holodomor began. She grew up in a big family. Grandparents had eight children – four sons, one of whom was Hana's father, and four daughters. She had a younger brother and sister.
It was a hardworking but not rich family, he says. Her grandfather Marko Švedjuk had some land and horses, but no cows. He gave part of his land to his son, Hannah's father, where he built a house.
But the young family lived there for barely six months - and the communist authorities began hunting down "kulaks", as they called wealthy farmers.
"Party leaders and young communists would enter the house and take everything, absolutely everything," the old woman remembers. According to her, representatives of the Soviet government also stole food from people.
They would even ask for what was being cooked or baked at that moment. "They would simply eat what they found or take it with them," says Hana Domanska.
In addition, mostly hard-working farmers were kidnapped. "They were looking for people who could work, who were not lazy, and they took them with them," says Hana Domanska.
A third of the villagers were evicted from their homes, and all their property and livestock were transferred to agricultural cooperatives - so-called kolkhozes.
Many were exiled to Siberia, including half of the Švedjuk family: grandfather Marko, grandmother Peština, then fifteen-year-old aunt Sekleta, father Vasil and uncle Todoš. Of all her relatives, only Aunt Sekleta later returned to her native Ukrainian village. She escaped from Siberia and walked with her sister Olha for three years.
Mother, brother and sister die
After her father disappeared, says Hana Domanska, her mother Olha went to look for a husband. Shortly after the birth of her youngest child, she went to a village where, as she had heard, the Soviets had set up a collection center for "kulaks" in a house where they were waiting to be transferred to Siberia.
On the way there, Olha caught a cold and contracted pneumonia. She managed to find her husband, but they wouldn't let him go. Soon after, she lost her newborn daughter.
After half of the family was exiled to Siberia, representatives of the Soviet authorities came to take Olha and her two children, Hana and Mikola.
"They said: 'Get ready, a truck is coming,'" remembers Hana Domanska and continues: "But my mother was already dying. She died lying next to her aunt, and my two-year-old brother also died of starvation. Only I survived. So I stayed with my aunt, whose legs were already swollen from hunger. But since she had no children, she took care of me."
In search of food
In order to survive, little Hana had to constantly look for food. In the spring, she went to look for edible plants. "When summer came, the acacia would bloom, everything would bloom and we fed on it. When we started working in the collective farm, there were a lot of weeds. We would pick it and make porridge from it. He would grind his teeth, but we had to eat something."
There was no food. "What to cook at home? There was nothing! In 1933, we cooked only soup. My aunt would bring some flour, mix it with water, and we would drink it. We had to work, we had to eat something," says Hana Domanska.
Back then, you could get two potatoes or a piece of bread for a kitchen towel. It was impossible to buy anything in the store.
Catastrophic situation in the villages
The worst was in 1933, when there were the most deaths, says Hana: "People were lying everywhere, some were already dead. No one could go to harvest some grain anymore. Almost everyone died then. And no one could bury them. They would stack the corpses like wood, put them on two or three planks and carry them to the cemetery."
Hana Domanska recalls that at that time there were no more dogs or cats in the village because they were caught and eaten. She learned from her aunt that there was also cannibalism, but she did not know about such cases in her village.
"There is nothing worse than hunger. Man, like an animal, does not enjoy anything, he sees nothing and hears nothing - the main thing is that he has something to eat," says Hana Domanska. "How can you sleep when you haven't eaten anything for days? Then you chew whatever you can find, leaves from trees, anything."
While talking about the Holodomor, Hana Domanska worries that they won't believe her. “But it's true. All this is on my heart. I'm telling you what I saw," he emphasizes.
Organized by the Soviet leadership
The Holodomor could only be discussed openly in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before that, it could have ended up behind bars.
According to Ukrainian historians, almost four million people died in Ukraine in the XNUMXs as a result of famine.
Artificial famine in 1932-33. organized by the leadership of the Soviet Union to force Ukrainian farmers into cooperatives and crush the national resistance movement against communist rule. In 2006, the Ukrainian parliament labeled the Holodomor as genocide against the Ukrainian people.
After the Holodomor, Hana Domanska survived World War II. Whoever did not starve in her village died in the war, says the old woman. Her father, who was deported to Siberia, also later lost his life at the front.
She herself was almost taken to Germany for forced labor during the war. However, together with other young Ukrainians, she hid in houses and in neighboring villages. "Some were caught and kidnapped, but I was not among them," she says.
Now Hana Domanska has to go through another war - Russia's war against Ukraine. But she believes that the Ukrainian people, who have experienced many tragedies, will defeat the invaders. "Ukraine will not surrender to them. Ukraine will win," he says confidently.
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