Holodomor: ‘extermination by famine’ exhibit coming to Lumberland

Glen Spey survivor recounts experience

By SANDY LONG

GLEN SPEY, NY — Tamara Lycholaj sets a freshly baked cake sweetened with apples and raisins on the table. She serves tea, and talks about a time when this food would have been an impossible dream, a time when millions of Ukrainian people, more than a third of them children, starved to death during the enforced famine known as the Holodomor.

Lycholaj has never forgotten the horror of that time. “I was 10 years old during the famine. A child remembers everything. It stays with you your whole life. We were continuously hungry. We would eat anything,” she said.

Lycholaj remembers her father working all day to bring home a single piece of bread to split between five people. “It was like eating gold, even the outside of the grain. When you chewed, your gums would bleed.”

She remembers brigades going from house to house. “They were digging the floors and walls to see if anyone hid some food. They took everything. And people started to die. I saw a dying woman under a fence, laying down, all swollen.”

She remembers sleeping on top of a bread oven with her sister for warmth and creeping round the kitchen searching for a scrap of something to eat. “I had such pain from the hunger. I remembered that once there was a little bag with grains of corn. In the darkness, I felt around. But it was long ago gone.”

This year, 2008, marks the 75th anniversary of the event, which transpired from 1932-33 and resulted in the loss of between 20 to 25 percent of the Ukrainian population. To raise awareness of the Holodomor, a traveling exhibit has been created.

Local curator Sophia Martynek elaborates: “In Ukraine itself, there was very little knowledge about the genocide because all mention of it was prohibited; you could be arrested for discussing it. About six years ago, Ukrainian historians collaborated to create a huge exhibit of photos, documents and eyewitness accounts.” An adapted version will appear in Glen Spey on November 7 and 8 (see sidebar).

After many years of denial, the Holodomor is finally being acknowledged as a heinous act of genocide committed by Stalin’s Communist regime against the peasantry of Ukraine, in a region considered to be the Soviet Union’s breadbasket. The International Commission, the United States and approximately 30 other countries now proclaim it so.

At a time when grain exports were increasing, the enforced starvation reached a peak in early 1933 when 25,000 persons died daily. Leading up to the Holodomor, Ukrainian peasantry had been striving for independence as a state. Their farming traditions and national values ran counter to Communist ideology and brought retaliatory responses from Bolshevik leaders. In the fall of 1932, collective farms and individuals placed on “blacklists” were punished with confiscation of all food and prevented from leaving starvation-hit areas by militia detachments.

Lycholaj’s family lived in Smila, in the Cherkasy region. As the famine worsened, her mother traveled to Crimea with the hope of finding food. The two-week trip was made in wagons overflowing with desperate people. Her mother was forced to ride on the hitch between wagons. “People were trying to save themselves,” said Lycholaj. “Mother used to chop all kinds of plants and tree bark together and would sometimes bring home potato peels from the market. That was a luxury. She would boil them together. I remember the burning taste.”

Lycholaj’s mother also traveled to a place where soap was made from animals that had died, and where she encountered a new horror. “Mother would go there at night for food. The cannibalism started in that place. Parents eating their children after they had died.

“Early in the morning, mother brought some dead animal’s meat for us. She was boiling and boiling and it was foaming. She would take the foam off for hours,” said Lycholaj. After eating the meat, Lycholaj and her younger sister, Victoria, became very ill. Medical care was poor at best. “We were getting, once a day, a small portion of barley cereal with mouse feces in it. There was nothing else left.”

Lycholaj’s parents and sister survived the famine. She married at the age of 20 and left home with her husband, Nicholas, in 1942 during the war, and could not endanger her family by contacting them. “I vowed, ‘If I survive, I will find you.’” She never saw her parents again.

Lycholaj and her husband made it to Austria, then Argentina, where they lived for 15 years before entering the United States. The couple had two sons. One was lost to the war; the other is a pharmacist in Scranton, PA. Lycholaj enjoys her two grandchildren very much.

During her life, Lycholaj worked in theater and opera. She still sings in her community and church choirs and plays the Bandura, a stringed Ukrainian instrument. She sends clothing and more to struggling Ukrainians back home. Her beloved cats provide endless joy and 86 years of living have given her a patient and hard-won perspective. “Que sera, sera,” she says. “What will be, will be.”