Thread by @MotronaCherkas

Thankfully, none of my relatives had to eat people or their own relatives. Some people who had to eat their own siblings slaughter by the deranged mothers are over 90s but are still alive.

But a cousin of my grandmother, was killed for food. She was a girl of 9-10 years. 1/

Her father, as well as my great grandfather, understood that they had no choice and he entered the collective farm which meant they saved their houses and some of their property.

Perhaps, that is why they still had a cow. I need to find it out while a sister of this girl is 2/

still alive in her 98. I saw her this May but forgot to ask, and I hope I will see her again.

So they had a cow, and Katrya (Katherine) and went to pasture her. They usually went quite far away at this time, though the kids were warned to beware. My grandmother, Kate's 3/

cousin said that when she had walked all the sides of the roads and paths had been full of dead people. Corps had been everywhere. But still they had to get kids to do their job, obviously, at that time everybody worked. 4/

When Katria did not come home, the family started to search for her. Then the neighbours joined, almost half of the village. It was big, thousands of people, 3-4 thousand.

They found the girl in one of the houses which stood alone in the field without neighbours. Her body 5/

was already cut into piecies. In the yard and in the house there were other bones, parts of the bodies. In the oven pots with broth was boiling (then it should be frozen to become a meat jelly), on the tables there were pies with meat. Human meat. My 98-year-old grandma saw 6/

it, though she was about 6-7, and the people pushed her out of the house.

There lived a family of three: a wife, a husband and their 15-year daughter. The wife cooked from human meat, and her husband took the food to sell it in Kharkiv. It is quite fat from. The city, btw, 7/

over 70 km. The people in the cities did not starve, they got paid at works, factories, state establishments and could buy food.

The woman was right in the house boiling and baking, there was also the girl. The man was in the city selling the food. The people dig out a pit, 8/

threw the woman into it and buried her alive. My mother said the earth had trembled for several days, but I am not sure. The police arrested the husband when he returned. As for the 15-year girl, they expelled her, and my mother said she ended up badly, but she could not 9/

remember the details.

It was a deliberate, planned operation of annihilation of the Ukrainian nation after the years of countering and the attempt to establish the independent state. The issue with understanding it is that it included both a social and an ethnic component. 10/

Those who do not want to recognize it as a genocide say that it was just a social policy referring to the farmers and that it touched not only Ukrainians but all ethnicities living in the rural areas.

It is true. Not only Ukrainians survived it but also the Jewish and 11/

German colonisers (farmers) in the south, the Russian villages situated in Ukraine (mostly were settled as serves by their owners), Bulgarians, Greeks etc.

But villages and the rural area were the base of the Ukrainian national spirit while the big cities were rather 12/

russified. Just several km away, on the Russian-Ukrainian and Belorussian-Ukrainian borders there were cordons of troops who catched those who tried to get to Russia. If you got to the bordering Kursk, you were mostly saved (in non-Ukrainian ethnic regions). 13/

Mothers threw their babies and kids to the wagons of the trains hoping somebody would save them.

The same we is going on now: the Russians are determined to annihilate Ukraine and the Ukrainian nation, they ban Ukrainian language, rob our museums and ruin our archeological 14/

sites. Same for the Crimean Tatars in Crimea, they have been erasing their history even more, since 1944. But doing this they are killing, torturing Ukrainian Russians, Ukrainian Jews, Ukrainian Armenians or Georgians, Ukrainian Greeks or Bulgarians. The P.O.W. they castrated 15/

on camera was a Ukrainian Hungarian who possibly did not even speak Ukrainian.

I usually cannot speak about it with non-Ukrainians as outsiders are not able to understand it. The second reason is shame. It is a deep shame of those who let themselves to 16/

become victims of such a travesty. The shame that I deeply believe follows each nation having survived a genocide, especially by the survivors and the first or second generation when it has not become history yet and is not weaponised . 17/

Perhaps, the reason I told it now is Bashevis-Zinger I have just read. One of his phrases: "During the war people climbed each other like worms" (he meant sex).

The minutes of the highest challenges rarely are beautiful. They mostly keep dirt unless it disappears in myths. 18/

P.S. In the died-out villages and empty houses, thousands of the Russians were moved from the core Russia, where the earth is much less fertile and famine was a norm each 5 years, unlike in Ukraine which has never experienced genocidal famine before. The same that they are 19/

doing now. They always change the population.

P.S.P.S. Qazaqstan suffered even more than Ukraine. Their toll is estimated up to 1/3 of the population though the real numbers are unknown. The reason they do not raise it in the world is their balancing between Russia and China 20/

I never reread my texts before posting so excuse me for the mistakes, the autocorrections and the repeated photos.

The day the people buried the wife alive and expelled the daughter, they also ruined and completely levelled the house and other buildings. Decades later even those who had been there could not find the exact place, everything was levelled to the earth.