Miron Dolot - Execution by Hunger

Miron Dolot witnessed the horrors of famine within his own country of Ukraine and later left for the West. He wrote The Hidden Holocaust years later to recall his past observations. Here are some points from the excerpts.

· 1932 - the battle for bread

· BASIC OVERVIEW: The Communist government began taking food from the starving farmers for the “greater good”, and it forced a mass famine from lack of crops

· In this year (1932) famine broke out and brought endless amounts of beggars

· People were roaming the forest for food and the riverbanks were crowded with hungry citizens in search of some nutrition

· Every farmer would go into the city looking for work, but since the city itself was already in economic ruin, the government made it illegal to hire farmers for any work in order not to make the job market too stagnant

· Deaths from starvation became a daily occurrence. The bodies starved were just deposited in a large common grave

· At the end of May, The Party (Communist Gov’t) had mobilized 112,000 members to secure a swift and smooth harvest, but it soon became clear that the nine who had come to Dolot’s village would hold tyrannical power

· The quota the government asked for in grain was just unrealistic for the farmers

· In January 1933, Dolot and his mother set out from the city to the town – everywhere on the side of the roads were frozen corpses

· Farmers were found dead having collapsed in their endless search for more potatoes

· A friend of Dolot’s mother, named Solomia was expelled from her collective farm because she had a child, her husband had already died and she could not keep up her quota. From there she went seeking a job but could never get one, and eventually she committed suicide in her Ukrainian national uniform.

· In March of 1933, the famine hit its worst point, as people locked themselves inside and neighbors became enemies

· The first rumors of actual cannibalism were related to the mysterious and sudden disappearances of people in the village

· One woman had killed herself after eating her three year old daughter, another arrested for killing her two children