The population of Kharkiv city suffered from the Holodomor-genocide of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. In the city, there are many mass graves.
Here you can see the coordinates of one of them in Hlyboka Hora district. According to the testimony of Yuri Hrytsenko (born in 1923), tank maneuvers were hold there, and deep pits were excavated. These pits were used in order to bury the bodies of those killed by famine.
Yuri Hrytsenko, who lived in Kharkiv in the years of the Holodomor, recalls, “I lived in Kharkiv, which was Ukrainian in spite of Russian authorities. In schools, we were taught in both languages. The Holodomor did not affect cities as much as the villages. However, when we were children, we saw the bread lines. Farmers or anyone who looked like farmer were thrown to the end of the line. The officials did not dare feed them; they were afraid this aid will be understood in a negative way and those involved in it would be exiled. I was sorry about the farmers who could not eat the food they harvested. I noticed one of them who waited for 5 days and begged. People fell while standing in the lines.
My wife, Lyudmila, who lived in Sumy city, asked her mom for food, but she always answered, “I do not have anything to give you,” and sometimes cried “Then eat me!” They even could not find the potato peels to boil. Their family was eating grass blades and chewing the shoe laces and leather in order to deter the hunger. Hungry people were swelling, like Lyudmila’s mother, for example.
Children were sent to beg for food, but the parents were afraid they would be kidnapped and eaten. We were told not to go outside alone because children were disappearing.
Every day, the trucks came to pick up the weak and dead.
The father of Lyudmila worked as accountant at the sugar factory, where he received two coupons for food. When the life circumstances worsened, his wife and two daughters secretly moved to their aunt in Polotsk (Belarus). They went back to Sumy after the Holodomor, when the situation improved.”
