Holodomor Survivors tell their Stories

List of Survivors:

Pavlo Makohon. Video
Describes the death from starvation of his four siblings and grandmother. Describes the cover-up of cannibalism by the Soviet authorities.

Zinadia Marusenko (nee Demchenko). Video
Describes how her mother′s sisters died of starvation in the village. Describes her great grandmother′s death from starvation.

Evdokhia Marych (nee Zalevska). Video
Describes the death of both her parents from starvation. Describes life in an orphanage during the Famine.

Pavlo Morenec. Video
Describes Dzhankoi, the first train stop in the Crimea, and how the authorities would turn away people trying to escape famine in Ukraine. Describes an encounter with a small boy in Dzhankoi.

Oleksiy Ohienko. Video
Describes how his father traveled illegally to villages in the Belarusian SSR to trade tobacco for grain and dried bread.

Halyna Onyskiw (nee Bielchyk).Video
Describes how the authorities searched their home for food. Describes how the family saved her grandfather from starvation. Describes mass graves in the village.

Valentyna Podash (nee Shevchenko). Video
Describes black flags hung in villages where everyone had died. Describes the bread with which her father fed her.

Valentyna Revutska (nee Vilchynska). Video
Describes children begging for food in the market. Tells how her mother worked in the village in place of dying peasants. Describes seeing corpses outside her school.

Valerian Revutsky. Video
Describes his experiences as a student from Kyiv mobilized to assist with the harvest campaigns in the villages.

Viktor Royenko . Video
Describes how his village looked during the Famine, what people ate, and how Soviet brigades searched villagers' homesteads for food and confiscated any that was found.

Luba Semaniuk (nee Novikova). Video
Explains how her mother traveled 150 km to try to exchange heirlooms for food. Describes the death of her neighbors from starvation.

Kateryna Shcherban (nee Levkovets). Video
Describes how the authorities dispossessed villagers. Describes her brother′s arrest for stealing potatoes, and how she collected grain stalks in the collective farm fields.

Ivan Shevchenko. Video
Describes how he tried to convince his grandmother to give him some more bread, and how his parents tried to help hungry people begging for food.

Olena Shevchuk (nee Yaroshenko) Video
Describes Donetsk city during the Famine.

Vera Stefaniuk (nee Dubeyko). Video
Describes the guarded grain silos in her village. Describes her mother trading things for food. Describes how her mother found a porcupine, which saved both of them from starvation.

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