“if YOU WANT TO EAT, GO AND DANCE!”

Conditions continued to worsen throughout the decade as the Soviet government embarked upon its collectivization drive in 1929-1930 in or­der to force all peasants into collective farms.

In an effort to carry out the First Five-Year Plan initiated in 1928, the Soviet government sought a radical reorientation of the economic basis of the country. Private landholdings were to be seized by the govern­ment, acting in the name of the people, and all land was to be transferred to public ownership.

Donia Presler, who was born into a family of musicians in Tulchyn in 1929, was still a spirited woman with a vivid memory of her childhood hardships when we spoke with her in 2003.

and music during the worst years of the famine: “There were years, in 1933> when there was a famine. There was no food. People dropped like flies. The children would beg: ‘We want to eat.' ‘If you want to eat, go and dance.' He would start playing and they would dance, the hungry ones. They should be merry People were falling. They were eating frogs

from the river. They ate whatever they could get.” Yosl Kogan's father, Avrom, who had been a soap-maker, died in 1933 in Bershad, when Yosl was six years old: “He died in '33, during the time of the famine. He went to these peasants. They treated him to vodka and whatever else. He got dysentery and he died.” His mother, who made a living making and selling almond candies, brought up Yosl and his two siblings on her own.

Raisa Chuk, an elegant and businesslike woman who was born in Berdichev in 1919, remembered the famine in her hometown:

It was such an enormous disaster. I remember well how we children were so hungry. Back then, I was twelve years old and my brothers were nine and seven years old. My brothers were always lying down and sleeping because they were starving. I was still studying at school, so I had to keep going.... My mother saved us from starvation. How? She took out the linens from a featherbed, and she took the thread from an old blanket. She sewed a blanket. At night, she would sit and sew the blanket and carry it to the market. She sold the blanket and bought material for another blanket and bought us a loaf of bread. Our mother saved us from hunger. I remember it very well. She would buy a glass of millet and cook a soup and [give] us a piece of bread. This was our meal.

Frida Pecherskaia was born in Bratslav in 1927. Her father was a coach­man. When we interviewed her in 2009, she reminded me of Whistler's Mother—she had the same noble poise and lanky figure, and she sat with her scarf flowing over her shoulder and her hands folded across her lap just like the iconic figure in the painting that hangs in Paris's Mused d'Orsay. She scolded me for not eating enough, and told us that during the famine, her parents sent her over to an orphanage because they couldn't feed her: “My mother was swollen. She would throw her­self down on the grass and eat the grass, and she turned me over to an orphanage. I was about two years old. I was in the orphanage until it ended, and my mother and my father came to pick me up.”

Some of the most detailed descriptions of Jewish life during the fam­ine, though, come from the writings of American Jews who visited dur­ing that time.

I spent a night in a worker’s dwelling in Tulchyn. The dwelling was so terrible that I cannot imagine how somebody could live there. It had the absolute worst sanitary conditions a person can come out of. The house was narrow, dirty, and suffocating, and the poverty was so great that it seemed to leap out of all corners. There was not a single piece of bread with which to calm the hunger. And everybody—the father, the mother, the children—were dressed in such torn, old, and dirty clothing that it was a fright to look at them?⁹

“Wherever I went and wherever I stood,” he continues, “people were talking about hunger and poverty, about sickness and death. Everywhere people told terrible things about a life that one can no longer bear, about suffering that is worse than hell.”³⁰

While those shtetl Jews who lived through the famine all recall the sufferings that the Jewish community endured, many admit that condi­tions were worse in the villages. Raisa Chuk told us, “Especially the Rus­sians in the villages would die. Over there they were in a terrible [condi­tion]. And in the town, we tried to do something about it.... Afterward they provided breakfasts at school, so we wouldn’t die of hunger.” Maria Yakuta recognized that the Jews were tormented with hunger, but her most vivid memory is of the Christians who died near the distillery:

There was a distillery near us, where they would make spirits from wheat, oats, and corn. There was [spent] sour mash there, from the wheat. And they would throw the sour mash in a ditch. The hungry people would go to eat the sour mash in the ditch, they would eat it up and die.

Klara Sapozhnik knew of those in Tomashpil who resorted to canni­balism during the famine, but she quickly clarified that she was referring to “Russians,” not Jews. Fania Braverman, who grew up in the town of Salnitsa, also identified the main victims of the hunger as non-Jews. Her own father worked as an inspector at a metal factory in Vinnytsya, from where he was able to bring some flour and barley to the village where his family lived: “I remember how the swollen gentiles from the village would pass by our house, so swollen,” she told us. She remembered one non-Jewish woman her mother fed: “She didn't know how to thank my mother. We were a little better off.” Chaim Rubin, who recounted the terrible suffering in his native Buki, could not recall any Jews who actu­ally died of hunger. Motl Derbaremdiker of Berdichev, though, insisted that “it is a lie that only Ukrainians died in the hunger.” When asked if he could recall any particular Jews who died, he answered affirmatively, but then went on to tell of several Jews who suffered during the hunger but ultimately survived.

Some Jews managed to survive because they still had relatives in America who could help provide for them. Tsilia Khaiut, who was born in Mohyliv-Podilskyy in 1917, explained that her maternal grandparents would send money from America, which her parents would keep in U.S. funds, recognizing that the exchange rates rendered their remittances worthless:

When the Soviet government came in, they were exchanging dollars for sixty-six kopeks to the dollar. And they were afraid. I remember the last time very well: we received several dollars and my mother paid rent with it; we rented a house. Everybody started with: “What do you need it for?” “What would you gain from it?” They sent two hundred dollars and it would be worth nothing when you put it into kopeks.

Yurkovetsky also shared that he survived the famine because his family received money from America. He told us that his mother had a brother in Chisinau, but since there were no relations between the Soviet Union

and Romania, his uncle would send dollars to America, and they would be forwarded to him. Those who had gold, platinum, or diamonds, he continued, could survive. Donia Presler also survived with the help of relatives abroad, who sent the funds that were needed to make purchases at the special Torgsin stores, which sold goods for hard currency:

We wouldn't have survived except for two sisters, Zisl and Gitl, who left for America just before the [First World] War. They left for America and from America they learned that there was a famine here. During the Soviet regime, there was a store, a canteen, where they had food—flour and corn—and if you had a dollar you could go and exchange it for food. So they sent us—there were four sisters and two brothers—and they would send us twenty-five or twenty dollars or so, and we would go and buy the food. We would mix the cornmeal with some water and a little salt. We would make a punch of water, cornmeal, and salt, and slowly, slowly we would drink it.... And this is what saved us. Without it we would not have survived. They were falling like straw in '33.

The Torgsin stores remained stacked even during the worst times of the famine, a scene that taunted the starving masses. In fact, the Torgsin stores were available to the political elite and those with connections as well as to those with access to hard currency or valuables. Money sent by relatives abroad saved many Jews who would otherwise have surely starved to death.³¹ Many believed that these storehouses were the secret reserves of the “bourgeoisie.” Pesia Kolodenker recalled that her mother insisted there were secret storehouses of food that the “bourgeoisie” held onto.

Motl Derbaremdiker, though, insisted that Jews had not benefited from foreign assistance: “The Jews in the small towns starved like every­one else,” he told us. “The only support they got was when people went to the big cities, to Moscow and Leningrad, and sent packages from there with sugar and bread, and it was already moldy.” Although an untold number of Jews died of starvation during the Great Famine, the ability of some to survive on the basis of foreign currency and political clout has contributed to the false perception, often manipulated for political reasons today, that Jews were the instigators rather than among the victims of the Great Famine.

The famine of these years has become a hotly contested historio­graphical issue: today, many historians believe the famine was manu­factured as a deliberate policy to punish the people of Ukraine for their resistance to collectivization. Some view it as a counterpart to the Ho­locaust and have come to understand it as “the Hidden Holocaust” or the “Unknown Holocaust.”³² Even the neologism commonly used to describe the 1932-1933 famine, Holodomor—literally, murder by fam­ine—is a semantic counterpart to Holocaust, complete with the same first four letters of the word. Although the most comprehensive research on the number of fatalities during the Holodomor have put death rates at between 2.5 and 3.5 million, many Ukrainian nationalists have taken to utilizing the figure of seven million—tallied as one million more than the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust—as the definitive victim count.33 However, it is not just a case of victimhood one-upmanship that shapes the debate over these figures. Rather, there is a deliberate link between this Holocaust equivalency or “double genocide” and the com­mon assumption that “the Jews” were to blame for the Holodomor, or this claim's corollary that Jews did not suffer during the Holodomor. In his memoirs, Miron Dolot describes how the Party blamed the Jews for the hunger at the time, recalling how a local Party chief explained to an assembly that “the real culprits who distorted the Party line and brought so much suffering to your village were the Jews. Yes, it was the Jews who did it; not our dear Communist Party"3⁴ As historian John Paul Himka has shown, this myth remains a common misconception, fueled by the writings of Ukrainian nationalists, and, at times, maintained by the Ukrainian government itself?⁵ The battle between the Holodomor and the Holocaust all too often takes the form of “victim competition.” In reality, both atrocities were perpetrated predominantly by outsiders. While there certainly were individual Jews acting on behalf of Moscow who prevented grain from reaching the neediest segments of the popula­tion, the Jews as a group bear no blame for the Holodomor. Similarly, we need to balance the atrocities committed by many Ukrainians during the Holocaust, often acting in the name of Ukraine, with the stories of Ukrainian heroism that saved many of the Jews we have been able to in­terview. While academics and journalists from the Ukrainian diaspora as well as nationalists within Ukraine launch diatribes, the Jews who live in the small towns that suffered during the famine, recall the misery and despair they shared with their Christian neighbors.

Despite the much-vaunted building of new power plants and indus­trial factories, the first decade of Soviet power in Ukraine did little to alleviate the day-to-day sufferings of the shtetl Jews. To the contrary, state policies deprived them of the little livelihood they had, and led to a generation reared in poverty and want.