Full Name in Ukrainian: Костянтин Іванович Кирищук
Full Name in English: Kostiantyn Ivanovych Kyryshchuk; Kostiantyn Kyryshchyk
Data of Birth: Cir. 1922
Place of Birth: Skarzhyntsi
Raion: Proskuriv raion (currently Khmelnytsky raion)
Oblast: Vinnytsia oblast (currently Khmelnytsky oblast)
Country: Ukraine
Copy of original: Yes
Envelope: Yes
Number of pages: 4
Keywords: Ukraine--History--Famine, 1932-1933--Personal narratives; Famines--Ukraine--History--Sources; Famine victims; Holodomor; Голодомор; perpetrators; victims; child; orphan; food substitution; survival strategies; physical deterioration; burial; family mortality; violence; cow; child labour.
Notes: Abridged transcription of Kostiantyn Kyryshchuk’s letter is published in 33ii: Holod: Narodna Knyha-Memorial. Kyiv: Radiansky pysmennyk, 1991, p.71.
Accession Number: 2007.2 - 1027
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Kostiantyn Kyryshchuk was born in 1922. He describes the events that occurred during the Holodomor in the village of Skarzhyntsi in Proskuriv raion of Vinnytsia oblast (currently Khmelnytsky raion of Khmelnytsky oblast). He had four sisters. One of his sisters, as well as his father, died of starvation. His mother died three years before the Holodomor.
Kyryshchuk remembers using boiled weeds for food, people being swollen and barely walking, and finding corpses in the weeds’ overgrowth. Once he tried to steal some ears of wheat from the field and got severely beat up. People were also digging up rotten potatoes that were left in the fields over the winter and used them to make pancakes.
Kyryshchuk credits his survival to working as a shepherd to a neighbor’s cow and drinking milk. He assigns blame for the artificially caused famine and deaths of his family members and fellow-villagers to Stalin, Kaganovich and Molotov.
