SYNOPSIS
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.