VIDEO
Ludmyla Pylypchuk, born May 10, 1924 in Berezhivka, Chernihiv Oblast, describes a search of her family’s home by the NKVD (Soviet secret police).
LP – At night, somebody knocked on our door. I heard my mother say, “Hryts, someone’s knocking on the door ‐ go take a look.” So my father got up ‐ it was the NKVD, dressed in their uniforms, and they started a search. My father had a library – they checked every book and separated them [into two piles]. At that time my youngest brother was two or three years old. They even searched his crib. They gave the child to my mother to hold, and searched his crib. To this day I don’t know what they were looking for. Later they climbed up a ladder to the attic, and found the three small bags of corn [that we had hidden]. They took it down and put it on our room ‐ the big one. We had a kitchen, where three of us – my older brother, my older sister and I ‐ slept, and my mother, father and little brother slept in the big room. They brought down that corn…put a seal on it, that this was state property, and told my father…when I think about Ukraine I have to cry…and they told my father “If even one grain of corn from these bags goes missing, you know where you’ll end up.” We all knew that this meant Siberia, and death. So they took my father’s books and left.
Interviewer – They left (the corn)? They told you not to touch it and (left it)?
LP – Yes. They left it in the middle of the room. We were at the state where my mother was swollen [from hunger]. There were three times in her life when my mother was swollen. My father gathered us all in the house, and said, “Children, what are we going to do? Are we going to die while looking at this corn? Or are we going to eat the corn, and die later?” We said, “Father, father ‐ we’ll eat the corn!” So we ate the corn. I don’t know how long afterwards, in the morning a man came and knocked on the door. My mother went, and I went with her holding her dress. The man said, “I’ve brought papers (a subpoena) about a trial. Please sign them, and your husband is to come to court for a trial.” My mother said, “the first name is my husband’s, but the surname is not.” So my mother didn’t sign. And that man left, and to this day, we don’t know (what happened). Somebody had written (the suffix) ‘‐ov’ so that our last name sounded Russian, not Ukrainian, and this saved us – 6 people – from death.
