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Archive-Oral-History-Maniak_Holodomor_Collection_-_YURCHENKO_files/2007.2-8007.pdf
LETTER OF YURCHENKO, VOLODYMYR
Maniak-Kovalenko Holodomor Collection

Full Name in Ukrainian: Володимир Петрович Юрченко; Володимир Юрченко

Full Name in English: : Volodymyr Petrovych Yurchenko; Volodymyr Yurchenko  
Data of Birth: Cir. 1926

Place of Birth: Rososha        

Raion: Lypovets raion  

Oblast: Vinnytsia 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; search brigades; cruelty; burial; burial brigades; mass mortality; cannibalism; concentration camp prisoner; Communists; Komsomol.

Notes: An abridged excerpt from Volodymyr Yurchenko’s letter is published in 33ii: holod: Narodna Knyha-Memorial. Kyiv: Radiansky pysmennyk, 1991, p.99.

Accession Number: 2007.2-1008

ORIGINALArchive-Oral-History-Maniak_Holodomor_Collection_-_YURCHENKO_files/2007.2-1008.pdf
TRANSCRIPTIONArchive-Oral-History-Maniak_Holodomor_Collection_-_YURCHENKO_files/YURCHENKO,%20VOLODYMYR%20%20letter.pdf

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Volodymyr Yurchenko was 7 years old at the time of the Holodomor which he survived in the village of Rosocha of Lypovets raion or Vinnytsia oblast. He recalls how a burial brigade was collecting people who were still alive and taking them to the cemetery. Some of those people managed to escape from the burial pit and survived. Yurchenko compares the actions of search brigades composed of Communists and Komsomol members to a “Judgement Day” and remembers the insensitivity of the head of the local Komsomol organization who mocked a couple (a man and a woman), who died on the steps of a church.

As a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp at 16, he met all kinds of people, including antifascist Communists who, he implies, were an entirely different sort of people than the ones that he knew in Ukraine. He questions, sarcastically,  why the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine Shcherbytsky speaks Russian instead of Ukrainian and why he was awarded the Hero [of Socialist Labour] rank. Yurchenko also opposes the construction of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine, because of the Chernobyl tragedy.

Speaking of the number of people who died in his village during the Holodomor, he cites recollections of his mother and uncle, as well as some other people in the village. Apparently, 113 people died during the Holodomor  in only the second section of his village which had eight sections in all.